Effective Ways To Make Your Cleaning Company More Profitable

Here’s the deal: Running a cleaning business is no easy task. If you’re already up and running, you likely know this and are nodding along. It’s a sector with razor-thin margins, fierce competition, and rising costs year over year.

If you’re looking to boost profitability without always raising prices to cover things like labour supplies, insurance, transport costs, and more, you need to find and make smart decisions that benefit you, your clients, and the service you deliver.

But how can you do this and make your cleaning company more profitable without cutting corners?

Control Labor Costs

Labor is the most significant expense for cleaning companies. The majority of every dollar coming in will go towards those working for you. Once you add in taxes, insurance, and other benefits, these costs can increase drastically—this can be a 20% increase on base wages alone.

But the fix isn’t to cut staff hours and take on more of the workload yourself; it’s to schedule smarter so you’re not wasting hours. You need to strategically book jobs that are in the same vicinity together so you can reduce travel time and schedule teams accordingly, so there’s no waiting around between jobs. You can try this scheduling software for cleaning businesses to help you cut waste from your schedule, organize open shifts, and keep to fair, consistent schedules that benefit employees and the company.

Price Smarter

You need the prices you set to cover your costs and to make a profit—that’s a given. However, it’s not always feasible to keep increasing your prices. Instead, why not try to engage with smarter pricing strategies?

According to contractorplus.app, there are several different options you can take and some important steps you should follow to correct your pricing structure so that you’re not being undercut by our own prices and are still maximizing profit.

• Multiply total worked hours plus hourly wages, then add 20%, for example, for taxes and insurance.
• Add an extra 20-25% on top of this for additional overheads (eg, rent, fuel, insurance)
• Have a markup of around 30% on the total cost for a profit and use national market rates as averages to set appropriate prices.

By Cleaning Supplies in Bulk

Buying cleaning supplies in bulk is one of those underrated moves that really adds up over time. It helps cut down per-item costs, saves on frequent shipping fees, and keeps your team stocked so work never slows down. When supplies are always within reach, your services stay consistent, and clients notice the difference.

What’s even better is that many online stores now make it easy to get both quality and quantity in one place. Take the premium commercial cleaning supplies at Shepherd’s Hardware, for example. Their range covers almost everything from industrial-grade detergents and surface cleaners to disinfectants and floor care essentials. Better yet, repeat business customers can open a Cash Account to enjoy a discount and added ease with every order. It’s a simple yet effective way to boost efficiency, uphold high cleaning standards, and deliver spotless results every time.

Retention Over Acquisition

Of course, you need to bring in new customers, but you also need to retain the ones you have, as this is going to be more profitable. Studies featured in Forbes and other publications state that it’s 5-7 times more costly to bring in new customers than to retain the ones you have. And research also indicates that improving retention by just 5% can boost profits by around 25%. Food for thought there.

Retention requires attention to detail, delivering on the customer’s needs, communicating clearly, and working at a consistent quality.

Extra Services

Often, it can be much easier to sell an add-on or extra than an entirely new service. If you have regular contracts and you notice that something is being overlooked or that you can offer a service you don’t already offer, bring it up.

If you already have a daily office cleaning contract, why not discuss monthly carpet cleaning with them, window washing, or disinfectant services? Look at what they’re not having done and could be interested in for impactful upselling on the services you already provide.

Or maybe you use a personally formulated cleaner for your services, and you can sell them to your clients for upkeep between cleanings to help keep their business looking good at all times, even when you’re not there. You have options; find what works best for you.

New Avenues

As a commercial cleaning company, it’s always worth looking at what you do and seeing if you can move into different sectors to help you build your customer base.

Of course, different sectors require different standards, methods, and equipment, so you need to be aware of what your limitations are to allow you to expand successfully.

Let’s say you’re providing services in the medical field or research labs. Can you move into crime scene cleaning or even the pet sector to clean veterinary practices or boarding/daycare services? Think strategically about how you can offer your services to different clients and use this to help you increase and support profits.

Retain Staff

Another thing that can eat into your profits that you might be overlooking is the hiring and training of employees to get them up to the right standards. The cleaning sector has an extraordinarily high turnover, and you want to limit this where possible from your company. Invest in training, conduct regular skills updates, track performance, work quality, complaints, positive reviews, etc, to deliver the right training and support where needed and ensure yu have the right people on schedule for different types of work.