Running a cleaning service business means spending a lot of time on tasks that don’t directly generate profit. You have to manage staff, bookings, payments, and more. Wouldn’t it be great if you could reduce the time you spend on those activities and spend more time building your business?
This article describes many ways to save time managing your cleaning service business. By making some tasks more efficient, you can serve more customers and make a bigger profit. In addition, optimizing tasks will make you and your staff less stressed and rushed. You will be able to spend your time on the parts of your business that are the most fulfilling, that remind you why you started the business in the first place.
Understand where you’re spending time
You need to be aware of how much time you’re spending in each different part of your business. Try tracking your time on each task for a week, and then analyze the results. This analysis can help you decide which services to optimize or outsource. If you find that you spend a significant amount of time each week putting out fires, that’s a sign that you need to improve your business processes.
You also need to know where your employees’ time is being spent. Calculate transportation time, time spent completing jobs, and administration time. What inefficiencies can you spot? Ask your employees for details. Maybe they’re falling behind when customers fail to show up on time to meet them. Perhaps they’re having to go back to redo certain parts of a job that don’t meet customers’ standards. Fleet tracking software can help you know how long vehicles are spending at each job. It will also give you an idea of the transportation time between jobs.
Give staff detailed worklists
Plan out the tasks that need to be done and who on the team will do them. That way, when your employees arrive at a job, they can get started right away. Providing these worklists will make jobs more efficient and reduce miscommunication. They can also help you form a time estimate for each particular job.
While building the worklists, think about ways specific tasks can be made more efficient. Make sure that your staff is employing cleaning best practices; cleaning a room from top to bottom and working systemically rather than randomly are best practices that save time. Ask your staff if there’s anything that could help make the jobs more efficient. For example, rolling supply carts could enable staff members to clean more quickly because they won’t have to return to one location to get supplies. Make sure that you’re using the best tools and products for the jobs. Low-quality tools and products will just make your cleaning service jobs more time- and labor-intensive.
Improve communication with and among team members
Fielding constant questions wastes your valuable time. If you find yourself in this situation, you probably need to improve your communication with your team members. One way to do this is to hold an in-person or virtual daily meeting. You can make sure that everyone is on the same page at the beginning of the day, and you can get any questions out of the way then.
It should be easy for your staff members to know their assignments. Online task management software can help with this. Make the key details clear: what the job is, where it is, and who is assigned to it. This will help all team members get on the same page.
Take advantage of technology
There are so many applications and tools available today that virtually any annoying, time-consuming process can be automated. Take advantage of technology to complete your bookings, invoicing, payments, scheduling, and route optimization. ServiceWorks does all this and more, and you can try it for free for 14 days.
Invest in your employees
Workers that are happier are more productive. Take care of your employees by providing them with a safe and fair work environment. Bonuses and incentives can go a long way. Make employee satisfaction a big part of your business strategy.
Your company’s positive work environment will show through in the service that you provide to customers. In addition, maintaining good staff relationships means you’ll have less turnover. Therefore, you will save the time needed to hire and train someone new.
Invest in great customer service
Great customer service should always be a major part of your time-saving strategy. Think of all the time that you spend searching out, warming up, and selling to new clients. Then, you have to complete the onboarding. This adds up to many hours per new customer. If customers don’t have a good experience with your cleaning service, then they leave. All that time was wasted. You have to go through the same process all over again.
This example illustrates the importance of good customer service. If your business is big enough, hire someone specifically for customer service. This person could field customer inquiries and manage some scheduling and payments as well. Make sure that your employees are also delivering great customer service by showing up on time, being polite, and communicating clearly.
Time-saving strategies and a game plan are key to running a successful business. Using the tips above, you can run an efficient cleaning service business that your customers will love to recommend.
