Funny stuff you notice over time owning a business

milspec6 wrote:Wow Matt, 9 cleaners survive with only 19,000 people?  Dman, I am doing something very wrong then.

I think it's just "more time needed to build a residential base".
But hit the comm, that's your meal ticket right now

I think it is the time factor. I have known a lot of cleaners that couldn't tie their shoes and almost kill themselves sniffing their chemical brews, but they were all busy.

With a little more attention this winter getting a stronger presence maybe that will start to turn around and I could get to where I need to get it in a couple of years. Still just trying to cover my bases and keep the lights on until then.

You guys hit the nail in the head, it depends on where you are, when I lived in central California, even though there are tons of new homes, people don’t maintain their new carpet, only a few do, and my figures up there is based on average market, Matt’s market kicked my figure’s butt to the curb because people like to live in healthy lifestyle ( go figure, you’re in Washington, lol ) but I’m sure if you go to AC’s market, it would be a totally different ball game, we heard his horror stories about these cheap skates in Seattle, big cities have a lot larger cost of living and they either ignore the cleaning needs or find someone like James mentioned, that’s why I don’t clean apartments often.
So, with the kind of quality work that you do, you need to advertise in the right places, either online ( chase after people that need your service right then and there ) or educate people in how important cleaning really is ( e.g. highway billboard ? ), it can’t be that expensive in your area ? And if you make it interesting enough, and point to a website that’s easy to remember ( e.g. carpet-cleaning-the-right-way.com or best-cleaning-no-buts-and-ifs.com ), that’s exposure that you really need, like my brother in law said when he was my partner, gotta spend money to make money, roll the dice baby, lol. It’s sorta true, you have to gamble a little bit and learn from your mistake when it comes to advertisements, if I can get my money back from all of the advertisements that went bust, I’d probably have about 50 grand or more by now.
Nonetheless, time factor is always true too, the longer you are in business, the more client base you have.