- Key Steps to Starting a Remote Cleaning Business
- Benefits of Operating Your Cleaning Business Remotely
- Essential Tools and Strategies for Remote Management
Q. What is a remote cleaning business?
A: A remote cleaning business operates with administrative functions managed online or from a home office, coordinating cleaning services at client locations without a traditional brick-and-mortar office.
From time immemorial, the cleaning business has always ranked as one of the easiest businesses to start. Most cleaning businesses don’t particularly require special skills, you don’t need a degree, and you don’t have to empty your bank account if you are starting small.
Alongside restaurants, fast food, and grocery stores, it is also one of the businesses that host a lot of local competition.
Anyone can start one by knocking on a few doors in their neighborhood; high schoolers do it during summers, some do it full-time, and for some others, it’s a reasonable part-time job.
Then, there are those who have made a multimillion-dollar company out of their cleaning business.
They are individuals who acknowledged how tense local competition could be in the industry but still decided to open multiple locations simultaneously by starting a remote cleaning business.
Clearly, as businesses across various industries are shifting to remote and hybrid work, commercial and residential cleaning industries are not left out.
Today, remote cleaning businesses adopt various forms of remote business management practices applicable in various industries.
These businesses use various digital collaboration tools and virtual office solutions to handle their administrative processes, coordinating thousands of employees in hundreds of locations across different countries.
Let’s take a deeper dive into the intricacies of the remote cleaning business.
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Starting Your Remote Cleaning Business
Although the big names, like Molly Maid and Merry Maid, started in the ‘70s with a more traditional approach, they have adopted remote staff management and other growth strategies to become global franchisors.
MaidThis and other newer and largely successful players in the industry hopped right in with their operations steeped in remote cleaning business strategies. Within its first year of operation, MaidThis had become a formidable local competitor across various U.S. regions while operating out of Latin America.
As a modern entrepreneur just starting a cleaning business or thinking of revamping your cleaning business, you probably want to go the MaidThis way.
If that’s you, follow the steps below.
Steps to Launching a Remote Cleaning Business
The steps to creating a modern remote cleaning business blend the old approach with the new.
It should include the following:
- An executive summary and detailed company description
- Market analysis data and the influenced outcomes
The state of the target market and competitive analysis
The desired target market share
Unique selling point and value proposition
- Management and operations plan
- Financial plan
Pricing – Hourly, flat, or per square footage rates?
Budgeting and capital expenditure plans. How much is available, and how much goes into what? Will you need to spend a substantial amount on specialized equipment? Are you seeking additional funding?
- Exit strategy
Step 4: Business Registration
Complete all necessary documentation and registrations you need to operate legally in your target location.
You should also check with the secretary of state’s office and relevant business bureaus to know what you need to do to set up legally.
Step 5: Set up Your Virtual Office
If you have all the money in the world, it might make sense to lease an office and run your remote staff management and other operations from it.
Otherwise, you could save thousands of dollars monthly in overhead by obtaining virtual office addresses and spaces in all the countries or locations where you wish to establish your cleaning business presence.
Without being physically situated in each location, you can obtain a virtual address at a prestigious business center and use it to register your business locally.
You can also use it to optimize your SEO strategies and easily capture local customers.
Other things to consider while setting up or starting a cleaning business remotely include:
- Remote staff management software
- Digital tools for project management, collaboration, and finance management
- Virtual office solutions that define cleaning industry solutions, such as
VoIP business phone numbers with unlimited extension for your staff across the country/globe.
Virtual receptionist services to guarantee excellence with your customer service outsourcing.
Importance of Robust Online Presence for Remote Cleaning Businesses
In the absence of an online presence, the “remote” aspect of your remote cleaning business becomes void.
If you are unable to steadily maintain and grow your online visibility, your business might slowly lose its grip on existing customers.
Therefore, your remote business management and growth strategy must be agile and incorporate elements that unwaveringly boost your online presence, keeping up with rapidly changing trends in the industry.
On the other hand, with a robust online presence, you:
- Become more accessible and visible to local and global audiences, establishing avenues for constant engagement.
- Facilitate marketing and branding approaches that are more effective and impactful in enhancing brand recognition, authenticity, and loyalty. Take a leaf from Two Maids & A Mop, which started making bank immediately after it moved away from paper-based marketing to SEO, PPC, and other digital marketing strategies.
- Maintain a competitive advantage over local cleaning businesses.
- Access useful insights from platforms such as Google Analytics, which provide data on your online performance, customers’ behavior, and other pointers to enhance your decision-making and customer experience strategies.
- Obtain quick and clear feedback on the performance of your employees or service points, giving you the opportunity to redefine your processes for better outcomes.
More importantly, there’s an utter need to ensure that you properly cater to all the leads and customer engagements coming in through your online channels.
Good steps in this direction would include utilizing:
- Scheduling software like Connecteam, Jobber, and Housecall Pro which helps cleaning businesses maintain a seamless workflow for scheduling cleaning crews and managing tasks on the go.
- Customer management services such as virtual receptionists who are always on call to attend to your customers and schedule appointments.
With these in place, you can guarantee that you are putting your robust online presence to good use, ensuring that you never leave your customers hanging when they need you.
However, without these and similar measures, you’d be left struggling to keep up with customer requests, inadvertently creating plenty of room for bad online feedback that could turn leads away faster than you can say hello.
Remote Staff Management: Strategies for Hiring and Training Remote Staff
Almost anybody can clean, sure. But does that mean you should hire anybody who applies? No—definitely not when you are running a professional remote cleaning business.
If you are running a commercial cleaning service that caters to pharmaceutical factories, you may need to employ HSE-certified individuals, or those with other relevant certifications to work in such environments.
Certifications and solid experience may also be concerns when hiring individuals to operate certain cleaning agents or equipment.
With residential cleaning services, you may focus more on the employees’ soft skills: their ability to maintain professionalism in an informal environment and get the job done without a hitch.
That said, here are vital considerations for hiring cleaners:
- Conduct checks to confirm the integrity of the applicants: request recommendations from previous clients and use platforms like Crtain to conduct background checks where necessary.
- Test and vet applicants with trial cleaning tasks to determine their efficiency, professionalism and other essential qualities that make a good frontline cleaner.
Once you have selected the best candidates, you should provide them with adequate training to instill a work culture that aligns with your brand image and goals.
Your training and onboarding processes should be elaborate enough to deliver the desired results without inundating your staff with too much information or processes that deplete morale.
It’s crucial that you acknowledge that your remote cleaning business won’t run smoothly if there is no clear line of communication between you and your employees.
You must emphasize that employees should reach out to you or their supervisor at any point if they are unsure of how to proceed with a job or are experiencing difficulties with a client.
Essentially, your onboarding process should highlight:
- Company safety procedures, protocols, and policies
- Open communication and mutual respect
- Teamwork and close cooperation
- Accountability to self and the company
Recurring evaluations will be necessary to bolster continuous improvement and to create opportunities to reward high-performing staff.
Advantages of Managing a Cleaning Business Remotely
By opting for a remote model when starting a cleaning business, you position yourself to tap into many advantages that are unavailable to a traditional cleaning business.
Let’s consider these advantages.
Improved Operational Efficiencies
Cleaning businesses that adopt remote business management practices as their basis witness outstanding improvement in their operations in record time.
The key drivers of this factor are:
- Lower overhead costs: Because remote cleaning businesses do not have a physical office, they can save thousands of dollars monthly on office leases and utilities. This frees up more money to devote to improving other business-critical operations.
- Flexibility: Remote cleaning businesses allow the owner or manager to oversee multiple locations from anywhere simultaneously. This allows them to adapt their local activities to local trends as they occur.
Scalability
With remote cleaning businesses, scaling is as easy as getting a virtual office space for less than $100 a month in a prestigious office building or business center that is central to your new target market. Next is conducting local SEO marketing and hiring or contracting local cleaners and administrators to attend to your clients.
The above paragraph paints a basic picture of how easy it is for a remote business to scale. It explains how top players in the industry can maintain a local presence in all the states and manage thousands of employees.
The point is that if you are about to start a cleaning business, you can easily and quickly expand your reach when you operate remotely.
You can change niches in different locations, depending on the cleaning services that are in demand in those areas. Or you could stick to targeting locations that house your target audience if you are trying to maintain a particular brand image for a long time.
Environmental Benefits
At a time when 66% of Americans say they would pay more for sustainable products or services, remote cleaning businesses find themselves right in the middle of the sustainability gold rush.
By simply eliminating the lease of physical office space across all locations, you are immediately conserving energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions—think HVAC, lighting, microwave, printer, computers, and even gas boilers. Double points for paperless transactions and reduced commuting.
Extra points for using environmentally friendly cleaning agents and equipment.
Beyond playing your role in environmental sustainability, this also positions you as a sustainability leader in the cleaning industry. A position that might make your remote cleaning business more appealing to more demographics.
Tools and Strategies for Effective Remote Management
You need some essential tools to support your robust online presence and efficiently serve the customers who come in because of your online visibility efforts.
Essential Software for Starting a Cleaning Business
Here’s a list of software necessary for starting a remote cleaning business that is efficient and outstanding in its operations.
ZenMaid
Regarded as one of the top old-school cleaning services software programs, ZenMaid allows for effortless client booking and automated employee scheduling and reminders. It also features options for clients to provide before-and-after feedback, creating an avenue for you to gauge your cleaners’ performance.
Jobber
Jobber offers an intuitive interface for both clients and cleaners. It provides an extensive array of features for remote cleaning businesses to effectively manage all their operations, including:
- Online booking
- Scheduling with push notifications and reminders
- Team collaboration and management
- Marketing
- Quote management
- Finance management
It also boasts an extensive client management system that allows remote cleaning business owners to streamline their customer experience processes.
Housecall Pro
This is one of the most efficient workflow management software for home service professionals. It provides you with a seamless online booking gateway for clients and integrates an Instapay feature for quick funds processing.
Housecall Pro is one of the best CRM software packages on the market for cleaning services.
ServiceM8
This software solution boasts a lot of interesting features that are essential for a successful remote cleaning business, including:
- Real-time job tracking
- Integrated invoicing and payments
- Employee locations
- Intelligent dispatch (which matches jobs according to a team’s location, availability, and skill)
- Compatible with most accounting software
Alliance Virtual Offices Virtual Office Solutions for Remote Cleaning Businesses
Many remote cleaning businesses are using our virtual office solutions to establish their presence in local and foreign markets while enjoying the support we provide to ease the logistical needs of running a remote cleaning business.
Business Address and Mail Handling Services
We provide credible business addresses in prestigious locations to remote cleaning businesses looking to make an unwavering entry into local markets.
Our business address services allow business owners to legitimately obtain and maintain a virtual office space and address that they can use to obtain local business licenses and business credits.
Additionally, you have access to a professional mail handling service, discreetly receiving and sorting your business mail. This also comes with options to forward the mail to your current address daily, on alternate days, weekly, biweekly, monthly, or whatever schedule you prefer.
Your mail can also be safeguarded for you until you are ready to pick it up or scanned and sent to you immediately over a secure server.
Meeting Room Access
Depending on the location, our Platinum Plus virtual office plan comes with up to 16 hours of professional meeting room access.
Our meeting rooms are professionally furnished to provide all the necessary comfort to make the incredible first impression you need to effortlessly sway big clients into signing long-term cleaning deals with you.
It’s also a great place to occasionally meet your team leads to iron out strategies and decide on a course of action.
Outsourcing Customer Service
When you run a remote cleaning business, one thing you simply cannot avoid is customer calls.
If you run cleaning operations across many locations and time zones, you know it’s basically impossible to keep up with all the calls and still be productive in other business-building processes.
The calls won’t stop coming just because you need time to focus on other things, and employing full-time receptionists across all locations is super expensive.
The solution? Customer service outsourcing.
Not sure where to start? Start with Alliance Virtual Offices live/virtual receptionists.
By outsourcing customer service to Alliance Virtual Offices virtual receptionists, many remote businesses have secured an extended team of certified customer service professionals. This immediately improved their customer support strategies and made them ideal for customer service excellence.
It’s a lot more than reducing distractions that eat up your time and focus.
Outsourcing to Alliance Virtual Offices’ live receptionists enriches your remote cleaning businesses with professionals who will:
- Attend to all your customers’ calls in a timely and professional manner, providing well-documented feedback and ensuring you never miss anything important.
- Help you capture and document more leads, invariably expanding your cleaning business.
- Attend to your customers and prospects with scripts that embody warmth and professionalism that reflect your business values.
- Handle your call-backs, appointments, bookings, and meeting schedules based on your real-time availability.
- Screen your calls to filter robocalls and telemarketers, forwarding only calls that matter.
- Use their specialized experience in the cleaning industry and knowledge of your business to initiate conversations that nudge prospects to take the next action.
Additionally, you can personalize our live receptionist services to fit specific customer service and administrative tasks that require the most attention, further establishing effective processes that push your business forward.
Remarkably, all these, alongside our renowned VoIP phone system with over 50 features, are available for less than $200 per month. The benefits of outsourcing your customer service far outweigh other alternatives.
Key Takeaways
Starting a remote cleaning business is a step in the right direction, especially considering that it’s more environmentally friendly, easily scalable, more efficient, and cost-effective. It gives you a competitive edge while simultaneously establishing your cleaning business in multiple locations.
Although starting a cleaning business might be one of the easiest businesses to start, it doesn’t mean you should approach it haphazardly.
It is absolutely crucial that you take all the necessary steps to ensure that your remote cleaning business kicks off to a good start.
Further reading
- Branding Brilliance: Real-World Examples of Impactful Brand Positioning
- Business Expansion Simplified: Hiring or Becoming a Growth Consultant
- Unlock Your Brand’s Potential: Mastering the Art of the Brand Positioning Statement
- Getting Started with Alliance Virtual Offices
Conduct thorough market research, find your niche, have a solid business plan, register your business with all the necessary agencies, and set up your virtual office in your target market.
When it comes to setting up your virtual office with all the right technologies and solutions needed to run a successful virtual office, you can trust Alliance Virtual Offices for impeccable delivery.
Our services are available in more than 1,400 locations in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Australia, Asia, and Europe, and we are happy to help you break into these markets.
Contact us for a free consultation and learn how you can use AVO virtual office solutions to dominate local and foreign markets in the cleaning industry.
