Seasonal Customers Angela Brown Ask a House Cleaner

How to Stop Seasonal Customers That Cancel Cleaning Part of the Year

Do you have seasonal customers that cancel during the holidays? They want you to hold their spot but they keep canceling? Here are some tips to keep the money coming in through the slow months of the year and stop the endless cancellations.

Podcast Rss Spacer Savvy Cleaner

Listen: How to Stop Seasonal Customers That Cancel Cleaning Part of the Year

YouTube Spacer Savvy Cleaner

Watch: How to Stop Seasonal Customers That Cancel Cleaning Part of the Year


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 Have Seasonal Customers?

Seasonal Customers, House with Snow on LawnDo you have seasonal customers? These are customers that really want your service part of the year. And then the other part of the year, not so much. Today the question comes from a house cleaner who asked this.

I was just wondering when customers are seasonal, they start out every two weeks. And then all of a sudden, when winter comes, they say, ‘You know what, don’t come over for another week or two. Let’s push it all the way till springtime.’ How do you keep those customers in place every week or two religiously? Thanks.”

You Have an Option Day One When You Sign a Customer

Seasonal Customers, Man and Woman Paying BillsAll right. That is a very tricky question. And the answer is, when you sign up a customer, you have an option. You can sign them up just willy-nilly and have no agreements in place, or you can make a concrete agreement from day one.

So, you can say something like, “This is if you hire our service in the next two weeks, I can lock in this rate for you for the duration of one year. If during the time you cancel your service for one year, all bets are off. And should you ever come back to us, whatever our going rate is at the time will be the going rate that we charge you.”

You Have to Plant a Seed Day One With Your Customers

Seasonal Customers, Man and Woman With ClipboardNow, when you lock that in place from day one, what you are is planting a seed to the customer that says, “Should you cancel your service later on in the year, I cannot guarantee your pricing and I cannot guarantee your slot.”

Because we only have a certain amount of hours in the day, and we only have a certain amount of work hours in a week. And so unless we have multiple people with free time on their schedule, we can’t just send someone else over without hiring someone new.

So we can’t always accommodate them. They’ll have to go to another cleaning service. That way, if somebody likes you and they want the service that you provide at the price you offer, they can’t cancel their service randomly. So that, first, is how you lock in a customer to the time slot so they don’t give you up halfway through the year.

November-January are Slow Months for Cleaners

Seasonal Customers, Cleaning SuppliesNow, we know by the history of house cleaning that November, December, and January are very slow months of the year for some house cleaners. And I say some because some people have not figured out that that could be your busiest time of the year, which at Savvy Cleaner has always been our busiest time of the year. Here’s why.

We book the time slots throughout the holidays, starting in September, October, and November. We book them out and we get paid for them in advance. And so then there’s no reason to cancel because the customer has already paid. Then when you get close to the holidays and people are spending on Christmas gifts, they have year-end taxes, property taxes, they have bills to pay.

They have other bills that are going to the deadline at the end of the year. And then in the spring, they’ve got taxes they have to pay. So there’s this weird window of, “Oh my goodness, my finances got tight.” So we want to get their money before we get to that big year-end crunch where the money is an object.

Many People Cancel Services Because of Money Problems

Seasonal Customers, Woman Talking on PhoneI’ll share this with you. Many people canceled their service because of the money issue. “Oh, I need to save a couple of hundred dollars a week. I think I’ll cancel my house cleaner.” But if the house cleaner was already paid for, why come on over?

Now, you said a seasonal customer, but I want to share with you this. Seasonal does not pertain to the house cleaning industry. We are not like landscapers where we have a beautiful green grass yard outside, and then half the year there is snow. We’re not like that at all.

We are on the inside of their house where they live 24/seven and their showers still get dirty, gusts still build-up, they still have pet hair, they still need our help. So there is no season in the house cleaning business. And I want to remind you of that.

Going Into the Holidays You Want to Put Together Packages

Seasonal Customers, Christmas Tree and Wrapping PaperGoing into the fall, what we want to do is we want to put together holiday packages. Now, at Savvy Cleaner we have a program, it’s an upsell package. We also have several packages and programs that we teach that teach you how to book maintenance clean, how to book a deep clean, and how to book special packages that you can sell throughout the year to keep revenues coming in so that your bills are always paid on time and you’re not dependent on the customers that may push you or may slide your cleaning into another time.

Now, one of the things that I might also recommend is having a policy of two times. If you cancel your cleaning two times in a row, you’re off our schedule. And the reason for that is not to be ugly.

And it’s not to say, “Oh, you canceled on me twice and I’m not up for it.” What it’s to say is, “I can’t guarantee you a slot, because if you canceled on me twice, you might cancel on me three, four, five, six times, and I could be selling that time slot to someone else.” So you cancel twice, over.

You Have to Have Rules and Regulations in Place

Seasonal Customers, Woman at Desk Talking on PhoneAnd so you have to have rules and regulations in place. Once those rules are specified to the customer and you’ve made it clear, you will find, you have very, very, very little pushback because the customers are like, “Oh, I’m going to lose my slot. Oh, I’m going to lose my rate. Oh, they’re going to be so booked during the holidays, they’re not going to be able to fit me in.

But if you start booking those spring cleanings and those holiday cleanings, the holiday decorations and the holiday decoration cleanup, and all those in advance, by the time it comes November, December, January, it’s already on the schedule.

We Give Our Customers First Right of Refusal

Seasonal Customers, Cancelation PolicyNow we do give our customers first right of refusal, saying you can cancel at any time, but once they’ve paid for it, they’re like, “Well, I still need the service because I still have Christmas tree decorations and I’ve got dead pine needles all over.

And there’s wrapping paper and there’s holiday stuff and there are all kinds of extra dishes” Whatever happened over the holiday. They still need your help. And since they’ve already paid for it, you’re like, “Sure, come on over.” So you get very little cancellation for people that have already paid for the service in advance.

You Can Build the Holiday Price at the Top of the Year

Seasonal Customers, Man at DeskAnd for people that are not sure, you can build the price of the holiday cleaning into the top of the year, which is going to be your January, February, March, April, May through the first part of the year, and then split the cost up and amortize that over the winter months when they know their budgets are going to be tight.

So there are a couple of ways to spring that, where we lose very, very little customers and have for years… Just you keep the same customers forever because we figured out a way so that there was no out. We did not give them an out where they could just say, “Well, just why don’t you come in a few months?”

You Can’t Hold a Spot for a Few Months

Seasonal Customers, Woman Cleaning and Talking to ManYou can’t hold a spot for a few months, you still have bills to pay. And so you have to sell that slot. Even if they’re the greatest customer on earth, you have to sell the slot to be true to your business and your employees and your family, and everybody that you’re trying to support.

So I love the fact that you love your customers. I love the fact that you’re trying to keep it steady, but you have to sell the service way early in the year, and then you have to backend it with a whole bunch of special projects and deep cleanings that are going to then encourage your customers not to cancel.

000 Savvy Cleaner Spacer Bar 2020Resources

Pitch Close Upsell Repeat: A Practical Guide to Sales Domination – https://amzn.to/2MBGIms 

Upsells Unleashed: How to Hack Your Sales Funnel to Double Your Profits Using Upsells – https://amzn.to/39tyxSp 

Growth Marketing: Entrepreneur’s Toolkit, Brand Psychology for Customer Acquisition – https://amzn.to/2KZfCFv 

99 Negotiating Strategies – https://amzn.to/39rklZY 

FLIP: The Four Levels of Influencing People – https://amzn.to/39tsb5B

Show Sponsor

Savvy Cleaner Training – House Cleaner Training and Certification

My Cleaning Connection – Your hub for all things cleaning.

HouseCleaning360 – A hub connecting homeowners with house cleaners

Savvy Perks – Employee benefits for your employees.

Turnover Cleaning Tips – for Vacation Rental and Airbnb Hosts

Scroll to Top