Hi friends, today we’re looking at what is one of the most underrated businesses in the home services industry.
Look, I know you may not call us friends but you are reading my post and that’s good enough for me. If it’s not good enough for you than just comment below and tell me why we can’t be friends.
Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Carpet cleaning.
You may be thinking, why is this an underrated business?
Well dear reader, let me tell you.
It is so easy to create an MVP
No, not that type of MVP like in a football game.
MVP is an acronym for Minimum Viable Product. It’s basically when you start a business and you are embarrassed to tell people that this is what you are working on.
Ever heard of Amazon? Yeah, this could qualify as their MVP stage.
With carpet cleaning, your costs are insanely low as long as you have a Home Depot within driving distance. If you are in the United States, it’s very likely you do. If you aren’t, then I’m not sure what to tell you. You might just have to buy a carpet cleaner.
Home Depot has an awesome professional level carpet cleaner available to rent for a great deal.
You could rent this thing out for 4 weeks, charge $30 a room and have it paid for after cleaning 15 rooms. If you schedule it right, you could have that done in 2-3 days. The rest of the 4 weeks is all profit.
Obviously, you don’t want to show up to someone’s house with a carpet cleaner that says Home Depot Tool Rental right up front. But that’s easily fixed.
You’ll have a simple logo from your marketing efforts, and just go to VistaPrint and make a vinyl sticker to go over that Tool Rental logo.
These carpet cleaners are also great because they are short with an extendable handle. You could put them into any vehicle, even a tiny Chevrolet Spark.
After your 1st 4 weeks you are ready to scale your business.
Basic Setup
You’ll want to be equipped with the following items:
Basic Website and Domain
Google Phone
Airtable to track orders and stay organized
Google my business(review collection)
Total cost: $12 for domain, free trial for website
Acquiring Customers
You’ll want to use a variety of customer acquisition strategies. The best fit for carpet cleaning would probably be:
Door to door sales and flyers
Local classifieds
For a full breakdown of customer acquisition check out my other post: Getting Customers for your Non-Tech Business
After you’ve proved your business will work with a rental cleaner and some basic work, hopefully you’ve cleared enough cash to reinvest back into the business.
You can start by investing in your own equipment.
Same thing as Home Depot, but it’s all yours.
After you’ve exhausted your customer acquisition strategies, use Google LSA(Local Service Ads).
These ads are great because you can verify yourself as a local business and get a special badge that Google has found you to be a reliable business.
They have a great calculator to go through potential ad spend and build your ads budget.
The sky is the limit
You can grow this business as much as you want. Hire good cleaners, expand to other locations, franchise, etc.
🤙🏾
I helped a friend start a carpet cleaning business. She got her knowledge by working for a carpet cleaning company. She worked there for several months and learned all about the chemicals and what they did. Learned how to get stains out and other stuff a carpet cleaner needs to know. I went with her on cleaning assignments and saw how her clients really appreciated her. She would offer extra rooms or furniture for a discounted price. Soon the customers were requesting her. I told her that she needed to start her own business. We went door to door and put flyers in mailboxes. The cleaner she rented. Soon she had many many clients some by word of mouth. It was successful until she decided she wanted to do something else.