a) How many people will need to access the software you plan to use at the same time?

Initially, many business owners start with just a single computer, but experience shows that, if your business is going to grow at a reasonable rate, you’ll probably want to have at least two computers initially. With a single computer, the person doing billing must share time on the computer with the person (or people) doing sales, and managing day-to-day requests for appointment changes, requests for additional work, etc. Our experience has shown us that any house cleaning business which grows at a reasonable rate will need more than one person managing the day-to-day operations. And if more than one person is involved in helping to manage the business, each of them will need access to the computer.

To cut down on start-up costs, you could always start with one computer, and then add a second (or third) computer later, and have all the computers

b) Selecting computer hardware these days is not as difficult as it once was.

There were times when computers cost thousands of dollars, and deciding whether to have a larger hard drive, or whether to install a network system, would run you into perhaps thousands more. These days, I recommend that maid service business owners purchase any reliable computer which has all the standard features. You’re not going to need the latest and greatest computers, with gigantic hard drives, or specialized video cards.

I generally recommend purchasing a computer from one of the major manufactures such as Dell, or HP. An important consideration: Check to find out what kind of support you’ll get from the company where you purchase your equipment. Once your house cleaning business is running day-to-day, you’ll become reliant on your computer system, and if and when there is a problem, you don’t want to have to start sending the computer back to the manufacturer via UPS or FedEx, and then have to wait days or weeks for the computer to come back. While the computer is in transit, all your precious business-sensitive data will be at risk. Your business won’t be able to afford a period of days or weeks without access to the computer system.

Probably the best bet for most people is to find a reliable computer consultant near you, who will help guide you through the entire process of purchasing the computers, setting up the network, and installing your software. In addition, the consultant can be available for you if and when there is a hardware problem.

I have seen many people, in the residential cleaning business, as well as in other industries that I work with, try to save money on their initial computer purchases – hardware as well as software – and who regret it later, when unexpected problems arise.

Choosing Software For Your House Cleaning Business

Your choice of software to help you structure, manage and run your residential cleaning business is of critical importance. Like many other decisions you make at the early stages of your business, your choice of software will continue to be with you as the years go by.

You are going to need some basic software, which every business uses. This is known in the software industry as “horizontal software”, meaning that it can be used for any business in any industry. Here, I would recommend a program such as Microsoft Office, which includes Microsoft Word (for word processing) and Excel (for spreadsheets). Note that you can also purchase Microsoft Office Professional, which will include Microsoft Access (a database program) and PowerPoint (used for making slide presentations.) You won’t need Access unless you plan to be doing some simple database programming of your own. PowerPoint can be useful if you want to make slide show presentations, for prospective investors, to train office staff and/or cleaning staff, etc.

The most important choice will be your choice of specialized software for your house cleaning business. (This is known as “vertical” software – it is created for businesses in a specific industry – such as house cleaning, home health care, exterminating, trucking, hairdressing, etc.)

There are a variety of companies that produce software specifically for the residential cleaning industry. Search in one of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) for terms such as:

Maid service software
Residential cleaning software
House cleaning software

One company you’ll find in your searches for maid service software is Thoughtful Systems of New York, who have been producing software for the cleaning industry for 20 years.

You’ll need to spend some time evaluating the various programs that claim to be suitable for your house cleaning business. Here are some points to consider:

1 ) How long has company been in business ?

A company that has been in the business of producing specialty software for your industry for a long time is more likely to still be around in a few years, when your business is growing, and the fast-paced computer industry continues to innovate and change. Will the software company that produces the software of your house cleaning business be around, and be offering an upgrade of their software for the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system?

2) Is the software user-friendly ? Will it be east to learn to use

Will you have to attend time-consuming seminars (in person or on-line) in order to learn how to use the software? Or is it pretty intuitive, easy to learn, easy to become familiar with?

3) What kind of support do you get with purchase?

There was a time in the computer software industry when various manufacturers offered free support for the life of the product. One of the most famous of these was the WordPerfect Corporation. At the time of the release of version 5 and version 5.1 of WordPerfect, you could call WordPerfect in Utah with any question concerning the use and configuration of the software. Support personnel were knowledgeable and friendly and spoke English well. If you were put on hold, you had the pleasure of listening to WordPerfect Radio, with a DJ spinning songs, and periodically informing you of the expected wait time before your call would be answered. Another notable company was Crystal Reports, which offered callers the choice between 5 different types of music – jazz, rock, classical, country or easy listening – while you waited on the phone for their excellent, knowledgeable support staff to answer your questions.

Nowadays, free support for life is a part of history. Whatever software you purchase, you can expect to pay something at some point for support. Software development companies charge a certain up front price for their software. If they didn’t have an ongoing stream of income from ongoing support contracts, they wouldn’t be able to pay their support personnel to provide answers to your questions and fix problems that may arise in the software. Most companies providing maid service software will offer some sort of free support with your initial purchase. Some offer limited support for a certain number of hours; some offer free support for an initial start-up period – one month, two months, three months, etc.

I’m personally suspicious if a software company offers free support for life. No company can afford to provide reliable, professional support for any complex software system without receiving some sort of payment from time to time from its users.

People don’t expect to receive free service for life for their cars, their washing machines, their TV sets or any other piece of equipment. You should expect also to have to pay something for support. Just find out in advance what you should expect to pay, year to year.

Find out what sort of issues will be covered by the support, whether it’s free or paid. Will the support contract include answering your questions about how to use the software (training), as well as questions concerning other issues concerning the software? Or is training and tuition considered separate, another service that you have to sign up for separately?

4) Is the company that offers the software a professional computer software company?

Or is it a maid service company that designed some software for itself, and then decided to try to market it to other companies in the same industry?

It might seem like a good idea to purchase software form another maid service company. They would know about what is needed for a maid service company, after all. Wouldn’t they?

Well, the answer to that is: Perhaps. My experience has shown me that no two house cleaning businesses are run the same way. Each one of the hundreds of businesses I have worked with has its own particular needs, problems and other differences.

If you purchase a software program that is designed by another maid service company, the software will be designed around that company’s way of doing business. This might not be yours. Look for a software program that can be adapted to your way of doing business. Don’t get trapped in the strait jacket of another person’s particular way of running their business.

5) Does the company providing the software offer customization services?

You may find that you need to have your invoice formats changes, or a new Work order (Job Ticket) designed, or have some other special need. Some companies will not modify their software for you at all, or otherwise will charge so much for customizations that it wouldn’t be worth it. Other companies have more reasonable prices for customizations.

6) Is there a guarantee with the software?

Some companies offer a return period – if you don’t like the software during your trail period, you can return the software for a full refund. Other companies don’t offer such free trial periods. Ask about it.

7) last, but not least: What is the price of the software?

I have found that many people think about price first, when thinking about what software to choose for their house cleaning business. However, you can’t judge a software program solely on the initial purchase price. You need to think about the cost of the software to you over several years. Find out what your total costs will be for the first three or four years of your business.

Is there an additional charge for enhancements and updates?
Is there an additional charge for training?
What is the cost of annual support? (and is there a special charge you’ll have to pay to reinstate your support contract if you allow it to lapse for a month or two?)

Some companies have a starter version of their software that you can begin with. Then, as your residential cleaning business grows, you can update the software, and move to the next highest level of the software.

Good software will save you a lot of time in your business. Having the right software means you don’t have to re-write customer details each time you send your maids out. It also means you can save details concerning your customers’ likes and dislikes, thus allowing you to provide better service, and reduce the number of customers who cancel their service because their wishes are not being met.

Also, the right software for your house cleaning business will include time-saving features, such as mapping, which allows you to provide your cleaners with detailed directions of how to get to clients’ houses. This saves your workers time, and saves you money, as you’ll probably be paying them for travel time. Some companies also provide cars to employees.

At he same time, your software should include, at a minimum, the following modules:

Customer Information
Accounts Receivable
Job Scheduling
Payroll

Each of these modules saves you time, makes you more efficient, and allows you to provide better service for your customers. Without proper software, you or one of your employees will be spending several hours a week maintaining accounts, preparing invoices, managing complex job schedules, preparing payroll, and more. If you save only 10 hours a week (that’s 2 hours per day), you’ll be saving 520 hours a year. And if you pay your office employee only $10 per hour, that represents a potential saving of $5,000 per year – just in terms of time saved. Add to that the fact that with the right software you’ll have better customer retention! The value of that is impossible to estimate.

I have seen jut one aspect of a program save a business owner many hours per week. For example, one maid service operator purchased a credit-card processing module, which integrates with their residential cleaning software program. Before using this feature, the owner’s husband was spending at least 10 hours a week running credit cards through a manual machine. After implementing the automated credit card module, he had to spend only a few minutes per night running through all the credit card charges for the day.

B) Marking

t’s important to consider how you’re going to market your new house cleaning business. You can have excellent employees, who are well-trained, and have excellent administrative back-office systems in place, but if no one knows about you, you’re not going to get any business.
I’ve found, in working with a variety of residential cleaning businesses, that frequently marketing doesn’t get enough attention, and business suffers as a result. Therefore, make sure you have allocated enough money in your initial budget (which is part of your business plan) to launch your marketing initiatives.

You’ll probably want to consider all or some of the following:

Yellow Pages Listings
Although the Yellow Pages is not as important a source as it once was, it still remains a basic source of advertising – letting people know that you’re there, and open for business.

Web Site
Nowadays, more and more people search for services and products on the internet. In my experience, people under 30 rarely, if ever, use the Yellow Pages. They grew up with the internet and are familiar and comfortable with it. So make sure you have a web site, where people can find you.

There are many web designers out there who can design a web site for you. Getting your personalized web page for your house cleaning business launched involves several steps, from conception to implementation.

If you want to save money initially, you can consider buying a “web page in a box”. There are various companies that will provide you with a generic web page. They’ll offer to change the name and a address shown on the main page, and perhaps a few other details, to customize the site for your residential cleaning business. This may be sufficient for a start, but if you can, you’ll probably want to get your own web site specially designed for you.

I have et many people over the years who tell me they don’t need a web page designer to create their web site – their brother, or son, or brother-in-law knows how to create web ages easily, and it’s going to save money. So why bother with a professional designer? Well, I don’t know your brother, son, daughter, or brother-in-law, so I may be wrong. But … in my experience, I have never seen a web site designed for free by a relative who’s an amateur that looks well-done and professional. Your web site is going to present you and your business to thousands of prospective customers. Make sure it looks good, and don’t try to cut corners.

Some web pages for house cleaning businesses have a section where visitors to the site can enter their details and request a quote. Some even have software included in the web site which generates a quote for the prospective customer. I personally don’t recommend this unless your prime approach to getting customers is based on having the lowest price.

Once you have selected a web designer whose previous work you like, you’re almost done. Once the web page is completed, you’re going to register a URL for the web site, and arrange for the site to be hosted at a server somewhere. Many web designers can help you in arranging to get your URL registered, and your hosting account set up. Inquire from them before you sign your contract. Are these services included? If not, what is the cost for each service?

You may think that now your web site is completed, and it’s hosted, and you can now type in www.my-house-cleaning-business.com, and see your new site, that you’re done. Not so fast! Now you have to think about how people will find your site, and SEO (Search Engine optimization).

The first thing you’ll need to do is submit your site to all the major search engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN, ASK, etc. This can be time-consuming to do yourself. You might want to arrange to have your web designer do this for you.

Search Engine optimization (SEO) is a new field of endeavor related to the web, that is becoming a specialized industry in itself. Once your web page has been created and is now sitting on the web, along with a billion others, you may want to consider finding ways to have your listing do better in the search engines. A SEO specialist can help you do this.

PPC Campaigns: Most people searching the web with a search engine – Google, for example – will read through only the first ten or twenty listings that appear in response to the search term they entered. Fortunately, you can pay Google a certain amount to arrange to have your listing/s appear in the “Paid listings” section of their site. (How do you think Google makes those enormous annual sales figures, and why their stock keeps soaring upwards? PPC is a huge multi-million dollar business!)

Costs for this will vary. First you need to sign up with Google, and then you’ll need to decide how much you want to bid for individual search terms. You can also set a daily limit, defining how much you’re prepared to spend a day for clicks.

Leaflets, Door Hangers, etc.
Leaflets are an old standard for marketing any service business. Many maid services around the country use leaflets from time to time to advertise their services. One of our clients spent between $30,000 and $50,000 on leaflets and door hangers in the first few months after opening his doors, to attract new customers. He was successful in giving his maid service business a good, quick kick start. However, this was before the days of the internet, when internet advertising wasn’t available. This doesn’t mean, however, that leaflets and door hangers won’t continue to be effective in this day and age!

C) Your Logo

You’re going to want to have a pleasing logo, which you can use to identify your business. This can be used on your web page, on your letterheads, business cards, etc. There are specialty designers who’ll design a logo for you. Costs can vary from a couple of hundred dollars to thousands of dollars. The amount you pay won’t necessarily correspond with the effectiveness and beauty of your logo. The logo for the 2012 Olympics in London was recently shown to the public, and no one seemed to like it. It cost the London Olympic committee $500,000! I have seen many excellent logos designed for anything from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars. Go figure!

Take a look at some well-known logos before you hire a designer. Have you noticed that some very memorable logos (Microsoft, IBM for example) are pretty simple?

D) Your Company lmage

You’ve already decided what market segment you plan to appeal to, haven’t you? If not, it’s important to decide if you’re going to present your business as one appealing to the wealthy, discriminating consumer, or you might be appealing to the average consumer, or you may be appealing to people to hire your business because you’re the least expensive. You’ll want your web site to reflect the style of your business.

I believe a residential cleaning business needs to have a personal touch. If I’m looking for someone to come and clean my house, I want to feel comfortable that the person I hire is reliable, honest and trustworthy, competent, and accessible if and when I need to talk with them, to give them any special instructions on what to clean, how to clean it, etc.

You’ll want your business to be able to provide this personalized service, as much as possible, by having friendly, well-spoken, intelligent people answering the phones, and having specialty house-cleaning software that enables you to record the special requests and needs that each individual customer wants. These notes should print out onto the job tickets that are given to the employees when they go out to do their cleaning jobs for the day.

E) Consulting

If you’ve run one or more businesses before, then you probably have learned through experience about the many do’s and don’dont’s of starting and running a business. If you don’t have experience in running a business, whether a house cleaning business or any other kind of business, then you should probably get some sort of training and help, so that you don’t have to learn everything through experience.

I started my first business when I was about 18 years old, and being arrogant and consumed with an unrealistic sense of my own skills in almost any endeavor I chose to undertake, I launched into the business without much forethought. I was studying business at university, and had done very well in all the business courses I took at university and high school. The business started off well enough, and soon I had the main newspaper in town giving me free publicity – something I took somewhat for granted at the time. When I look back on these events, I’m personally amazed at my own naïveté. I was so good at promoting and selling water beds, the first in this large city to do so, that I actually educated a lot of other people about the beauty and advantages of water beds. Soon, some businessmen with a lot more experience than I had set up a shop with elegant displays, were purchasing expensive, sexy ads in the press, and were promoting water beds as the latest thing in luxury furniture that you must have of you are to be fashionable.

I had a great idea, but didn’t execute it well. I was under-capitalized and lacked a coherent business and marketing plan. Others with less imagination then me, but with better organizational skills managed to outdo this 18-year old.

I look back at this with some amusement. I invested only a few dollars in the enterprise and actually sold enough water beds over a three-year period to give me a reasonable income. But I missed out on the opportunity of becoming the waterbed king of the city! No worries. That was a long time ago, and money wasn’t the most important thing on my mind back then.

You’re probably going into your new residential cleaning business with the object of making a good profit, and having a good living come out of the business. You will be putting a certain amount of capital at stake, and spending a considerable amount of time, so the fewer mistakes you make the better. If you are planning to become part of a national franchise, you’ll receive a lot oft training from the franchise organization. If the franchiser has done their job well, they will provide you with a lengthy and detailed list of things to do, and not to do. For this you’ll pay an up front franchise fee, and you’ll also be paying the franchiser a percentage of your monthly sales every month, for as long as you continue to be a member of the franchise organization.

Statistics show that a large percentage of new businesses fail within the first year of starting. Many more fail in years 2 and 3. There is a very small percentage of small businesses still in business after five years. However, the figures for members of franchises are much better.

Why is this? A lot of it has to do with the fact that a good and competent franchise organization have thought through all the aspects of what it takes to run a successful house cleaning business. They’ve thought about how to select and train the employees; the design of uniforms, the company logo, where you should spend your marketing dollars, and more. Some franchisers also provide you with computer software, which you can use to help manage your franchise (and which will be used to keep track of your monthly sales, so that the franchiser and you will know exactly how much you owe the franchiser from month to month.)

Note that some franchisers will allow you to choose your won software. This is not a bad idea, in my opinion. Consider what could happen of you’re locked in to using a particular piece of software. One very large national franchise chain nearly had a resolution on its hands a few years ago, because the franchisees found the software they were provided to be inadequate and slow, and lacking in flexibility.

Another alternative is to find a different way of educating yourself about running a home cleaning business. These days, there are other alternatives. Some other options include:

Books
CD’s
Internet Sites (such as this one)
Consultants and Coaches