The cleaning industry will never lose business. That being said, the biggest challenge for your window cleaning business is securing the clientele that you need to ensure your window cleaning service will not just survive but thrive.
Whether you’re looking to start a window cleaning business or you’re already a business owner and simply need help securing more clients, let’s take a look at some tips on how to get window cleaning contracts with greater ease.
Before You Start: Working on Your Business Plan
Suppose you’re interested in starting a local business for window cleaning or you want to return to square one to improve your business structure for a more successful business. In that case, you always need to start with a business plan.
Skipping this step not only puts you at risk of incurring fees and penalties for missing crucial aspects of establishing your business operations, but it also prevents you from understanding who you should be targeting as new customers.
With the above in mind, a business plan is quite extensive. If this is your first crack at a window-washing business, you might not know exactly where to get started. Here are a few tips to help you set up your business successfully.
- Come Up With a Business Name: Some window cleaners opt for a safer name for their cleaning business while others will come up with a silly or memorable name to try to ensure that their marketing sticks in local customers’ heads. It’s important to come up with a business name that you will stick with for a while, although you can always change it and rebrand later.
- Decide on a Business Structure: A business structure is important to get the right tax benefits and liability protection. Are you going to be an LLC? A sole proprietorship? More importantly, will you classify your business as an S Corp (depending on your business structure)? These are all things to think about as they can impact your ability to do business later.
- Learn More About Licensing Requirements in Your City and State: All physical businesses will need some form of a business license to do business in their area. They’ll also need to be registered with the state so that the powers that be know about your business activity. The best way to navigate this is to hire a legal professional or team who can manage the paperwork and get your cleaning business license for you.
- Outline Your Business Vision and Hierarchy: What are your business goals? What is your mission statement? What will the structure of your business look like? When you understand what your new business aims to accomplish and how it will achieve that, it becomes significantly easier to get business.
- How Will You Fund Your Business: Cleaning supplies, fleets, and other business expenses and business assets cost money. A commercial or residential cleaning business needs funding to start landing cleaning jobs. Whether you’re interested in business loans, opening up business credit cards, or even crowdfunding (you’ll need a business bank account to get started as well), figure out how you’re going to fund your business and look to resources that can help you find money for your window cleaning supplies and beyond.
- Is Your Business Plan Viable?: You can’t make your business successful. That’s dependent upon many factors that you may want to consider before you start your own business. For example, when you’re going to write a business plan, look into how many businesses are already in the area. Is there too much competition? Is there enough demand to keep your commercial window cleaning business going strong? The more research you do, the better prepared you’ll be to see if you can run a successful window-cleaning business.
- Business Insurance: Alongside business permits, most businesses need some form of insurance, whether this covers workers’ comp, auto insurance, or beyond. Make sure you have the required window cleaning insurance in your state so that you’re covered in any scenario. You can generally get a quote for free so you know how much things will cost before you get the coverage you need.
Another key aspect of a solid business plan is a strong marketing strategy. But this in and of itself is a major undertaking. We’ll cover how you can reach potential customers in the next section.
Marketing Strategies for Cleaning Companies: How to Get Window Cleaning Contracts
Marketing strategies are a crucial part of your approach and success, but they’re also a separate beast entirely. They’re part of your overall plan and strategy, but they require in-depth research that sets them apart from other areas of the planning stage.
So, how can you get commercial cleaning contracts or residential cleaning business? Regardless of whether you’re a commercial cleaning business or the latter, here’s how you can create an extensive and effective plan for landing window cleaning jobs and getting the window cleaning contracts that you need to stay open.
Conduct Deep Market Research
Even if you’re just looking to clean windows, you need to understand your market. Window cleaning companies are often touted as an easy way to make money. The reality? Like any industry, it’s important to know whether or not your cleaning solutions are going to survive in the areas that you’re looking to serve. Conducting deep market research into the window cleaning industry to see how many are currently operating in your area, who they’re targeting, how their business is faring, and more can tell you more about any strengths or weaknesses in your competition and how you can leverage that to your advantage. Or, it will tell you if you need to target another type of cleaning because there are too many professional window washers in your area.
Establish Client Personas
All window cleaners don’t provide the same type of services. As such, they won’t be looking to get customers who want the same type of support. For example, if you’re looking to start a window-washing business that offers commercial cleaning services, you may be looking to target business owners who need high rise window cleaning or other specialized services. If you don’t want to start a commercial cleaning business but instead want to offer residential window cleaning services, you’ll be targeting homeowners or property owners who need support with keeping their homes looking great. Establish client personas to understand who they are, what their pain points are, and how you can effectively market your business to them so that you can strengthen your customer acquisition efforts.
Hone Your Talents and Offerings
What are you good at, and how can you make sure that you’re able to demonstrate that to your customers? Promoting your window cleaning business becomes substantially harder if you’re not able to clean all the different types of windows you want to or you don’t have a track record of house cleaning or high-rise window cleaning. To get your business up and running, you need to hone your cleaning techniques, develop and understand the services you specialize in, and start cleaning whatever you can so that you can generate positive customer feedback and establish a history of doing the jobs you’re looking to find new customers for.
Invest in Marketing Materials to Get Word of Your Business Out There
Every window cleaning business requires marketing materials to get word of their business out there. This can include banners and signs to increase foot traffic and make locals aware of your new location, business cards that you can hand out at local fairs and other events, and even promotional products like branded pens and apparel that people can take home with them to improve their perception of your business and get the word out there for you. Marketing materials are one of the best ways for cleaning business owners to spread awareness and attract business.
Pay for Ads
Marketing materials that attract people to your place of business expand far beyond what you place in the new windows of your business location or what you put outside of your place of business. Paying for ad space on TV or paying for ads on billboards can be a stellar way to attract eyes to your business. If you get the opportunity, consider using these strategies to boost business.
Use Cold Calling
Cold calling is arguably one of the most invaluable tools that businesses have at their disposal. Window cleaners typically start marketing by cold calling to find interested parties who they can send their cleaning team to. Once their business is secured, then it’s just a matter of making sure to send reminders so that they continue to use your service to keep their window panes looking spotless. It might be slow at first, but it’s sure to pick up as you refine your outreach strategy.
Don’t Forget About Local SEO
If you want to start a successful window-cleaning business, you need to learn how to start establishing an online presence. This starts first by setting up a website that’s fast, responsive, and properly optimized to target keywords that people in your area are looking for when they’re shopping around for window-washing services. Google My Business is a great way to ensure that your business pops up when people look online for services like yours. A Google Business Profile is relatively easy to set up when you’re starting a window-washing business. Then, you just have to keep things up by getting reviews, writing SEO-optimized content, and getting backlinks to your business that improve your domain authority so that you rank higher on search engine results pages.
Learning more about local SEO will go a long way in ensuring that your business is easily visible in the modern era.
Tweaking Your Approach
Many modern business owners make the mistake of thinking that their marketing strategy is something that they can set and forget.
But much like your business, your marketing strategy is going to be something that’s consistently evolving as you learn and scale.
This is why it’s important to tweak your approach as you go. Here are a few tips to help you adapt more effectively.
- Set Measurable Goals (and Don’t Be Afraid to Shift the Goalposts): Being able to measure all the goals in your business is crucial to being able to measure the efficacy of your business activities and make changes. Set key performance indicators in every area of your business. If you find that you’re not meeting sales goals or your marketing efforts aren’t helping you reach the number of people you aim to convert into paying customers, you’re in a much better position to analyze the situation and make the necessary changes.
- Determine What’s Not Working and Why: All of the data you’re collecting from your business activity can provide you with key insights into why something might be failing. For example, if you’re cold-calling people and you’re converting very few of them into warm leads, your approach likely needs some refinement. The sooner you tackle the underlying issues, the sooner you can start landing more contracts.
- See What Your Competitors Are Doing: Window cleaning is a service that still requires effective marketing, and the good news is that you have so many examples out there that you can take notes from. How are your competitors getting people to sign contracts? See what they’re doing and see how you can incorporate more of that into your business model.
To Expand Your Services or Not?
When you first start your business, you may only be focused on being a window cleaning service. However, as any business knows, being too niche can present a problem. If you cannot expand the services you’re offering, you may not have enough business throughout the year. Worse yet, you might be losing business to companies that offer window cleaning alongside other services that customers want at the same time.
As such, if you want to secure more business, you should be focused on expanding your services. Some of the services that a window cleaning business might offer generally align with exterior cleaning needs, including but not limited to pressure washing, gutter cleaning, roof cleaning, and similar services. It’s important to keep in mind that this might only apply to those offering residential services.
If you’re a commercial window cleaner, you could always expand your offerings to include window tinting and window film applications (for greater privacy in office settings), mirror cleaning, and indoor window and lighting cleaning.
True, you don’t want to stray into the territory of being a general cleaning company, unless you’re able to handle it. However, expanding your services will make it much easier to secure contracts with clients looking for window cleaning services and general support for exterior cleaning.
What to Focus on As You Scale
There are a few other tips that are worth using while you’re trying to get window cleaning contracts. Here are some other things that you should focus on as you scale and improve your business operations.
- Networking: Networking with local businesses is an effective way to land contracts. The more business owners you become familiar with and build a rapport with, the more likely they are to consider your window cleaning business for their window cleaning needs. Better yet, they may be more likely to refer you to other businesses in the area that are also looking for window cleaning help.
- Using Discounts to Your Advantage: Nobody can reject a good deal. No matter how much you charge per window or per number of window panes, consider reducing that price and offering a sale to bring new customers in. This will get them in the door and, once you show them that you can get the job done right, ensure that they’ll continue to use you even after those reduced prices have ended.
- Establishing a Referral Program: Did you know that you can have people do your marketing for you? Referral programs essentially make it so that people direct others to your business, and you pay them a cut of each successful sale that they drive. It’s an easy way to get more people involved in your marketing without having to hire more part-time or full-time staff.
- Leveraging Social Media: Social media is a must in this day and age. Set up social media accounts and start marketing your business online. It’s free!
If You Want to Land Contracts, It All Boils Down to Marketing and Your Level of Service
Getting your business off the ground can seem like an insurmountable feat, but it’s often less difficult than it might seem. If you want to start securing more window cleaning contracts, use the tips above to make sure your business is set up right, solidify your strategy so that you’re going in with confidence, and learn how to be flexible so that you can make the necessary changes you need to make to see improved results over time.
