5 Ways to Reduce Costs in your Cleaning Business

There are mainly two ways to increase profits in your cleaning business – increase overall revenue or reduce costs.

We’ve already discussed ways to increase revenue in your cleaning business.

In this article, we’ll share our personal cost-saving strategies that we implement in our own cleaning business, Maid to Glow, to reduce the cost of cleaning supplies, cost of labor, marketing costs, etc.

These are not ideas that we compiled from random internet articles, but rather from our own years of experience in this industry, successfully running a cleaning business.

Here’s what you’ll take away from this article:

How hiring contractors instead of employees will help reduce costs
How hiring experienced cleaners will help reduce costs
How to save money on marketing and get far better results
Why working remote is better to reduce costs
Why you should always buy cleaning supplies in bulk

Hire Cleaning Contractors Instead of Employees

We’ve done a separate article extensively talking about this topic – cleaning contractors vs employees.

Here are some ways hiring cleaning contractors will help you cut costs and save more money –

Transportation: Contractors are responsible for handling their own transportation.

Now, compare this to a regular employee. Not only would you have to provide a car or truck to your employees but spend money on its maintenance. Not to mention the hassle of handling the logistics.

Insurance: Once again, you may have to provide insurance and workman’s compensation to your employees but not the independent contractor.

Cleaning Supplies: This is where you save the most money by hiring contractors. Similar to transportation, independent contractors will bring their own cleaning supplies and equipment.

You don’t buy them these supplies or equipment, nor do you spend money on their maintenance.

Taxes: Hiring an employee obligates you to pay their payroll taxes, while independent contractors are responsible for paying their own payroll taxes, called self-employment taxes.

Overall, hiring a contractor is not just more cost-effective but also more efficient.

On a side note, at Maid to Glow, we pay our cleaning contractors on a percentage basis instead of hourly pay. Basically, they get a percentage of what we charge the customers for the particular cleaning service.

This does a few things –

It keeps them accountable since their pay is directly proportional to how good of a job they do.
It encourages them to upsell more services on their own.
It’s better and fairer for the contractors.

As you can imagine, this saves us a lot of time and money.

Hire Experienced Cleaners

This goes hand-in-hand with the last point. Hiring an experienced cleaner will save you money in so many areas of your business. Let’s discuss some of them.

Training Process: Hiring experienced cleaners will save so much more resources and time that would otherwise get wasted on training your cleaning staff.

Don’t get me wrong. You may still have to provide a prompt and guidelines on how your company operates and what you expect from them, but that will hardly be as cost-extensive and time-consuming as training them from scratch.

Client Retention: Experienced cleaners will do a better job at cleaning, so you don’t risk losing customers due to poor services.

A complete beginner may take a few cleaning sessions to get used to their job before they can provide five-star services to clients.

Hiring Costs: Inexperienced cleaners often don’t stick around for the long term. Sometimes, they leave on their own. Sometimes, you have to fire them, bringing you back to ground zero.

You then have to go through the hiring process again, costing your business time and money.

Sure, hiring an experienced cleaner doesn’t guarantee they will stick around, but they are more reliable than the complete beginners.

But eventually, you should also learn how to retain your employees.

Stop Spending on Google and Facebook Ads

We’ve mentioned this in multiple articles now. Google and Facebook ads don’t work in this industry for cleaning business.

Read this article to know how to actually advertise your cleaning services. We’ve explained why Google and Facebook ads don’t work and the alternative to them.

We won’t get into too much detail here, but here’s what you should be actually doing – list your business on Yelp, Thumbtack and Google Local Services.

Go Remote

Maid to Glow is 100%, fully, remote. We conduct our interviews on zoom calls, manage clients and cleaners with a scheduling software – Maidily and automate bookings with a website.

You save money on renting a workspace or office that’s not essential anyway. And since we only hire independent contractors, we save money on equipment, supplies and transportation, as already discussed.

It’s also more productive for us and the cleaners to work remotely. Saves us more time that we can then utilize to grow our business further.

Sure, initially, it’s not easy to start and manage a remote cleaning business, but the turbulence only lasts temporarily. After some point, everything starts aligning, and the process gets smooth.

I highly recommend you invest in a scheduling software like Maidily if you’re running a cleaning business remotely. Otherwise, it’s almost impossible to sustain it manually. You must automate your business processes at some point.

The only reason I could make Maid to Glow a success is that I used Maidily. We’ve done an article talking about the importance of automation and how it helps you grow your business fast.

Purchase in Bulk

We discussed how hiring cleaning contractors are better than hiring employees. But we also understand that not everyone runs their business like that.

So for the people who hire employees, you should always buy your cleaning supplies in bulk to reduce the total costs. Also, try to buy multipurpose tools and products whenever possible.

It’s a pretty basic strategy that almost everyone knows about but is still worth mentioning.