5 months in as a house cleaning business owner

The good news is that the business now has 17 homes we are responsible for cleaning.

That said, the way I figure clients is based on frequency of cleaning.  The more frequent we clean for them, the more they count towards the total number of clients I officially have.

A client that has us cleaned at least every 2 weeks is counted as one client. A monthly cleaning client is counted as a half a client. So in reality the business actually has 12 clients.

These customers bring in $2255 in gross income per month. Figuring a 30% net income for me that means I am earning $675/month. Not a killing but not anything to sneeze at.

I have one employee and I am running an ad on Indeed.com looking for another employee.

I’ve gotten five of the homes from the weekly newspaper and seven from EDDM. The newspaper clients cost $20 each. The EDDM (ignoring the first mailing) cost $42 each. Update 11 months in: seven new clients from EDDM is very, very unusual. I have gotten as few as one new customer for 1600 postcards mailed at a total cost of $600. Ouch.

I’ve been considering door to door flyer delivery. If I do that by myself it’s free or with someone it costs me $19.25/hour. I need to hand out about 200 flyers to get 1 new client. One person can hand out 25 flyers in an hour. Using someone to deliver flyers cost about $120 to get a new client. Not a good return on investment.

So how many customers are needed so that the marketing is self-sustaining, starting from zero?

5 months after writing the article:

Originally I had a formula that explained how many clients I needed to grow the business organically. (Organically: Not puting any of my money into the business. Only using the business income to grow.)

The information that I put down was incorrect based on assumptions that turned out to be untrue. 

The information was deleted. 

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