How to Structure a Cleaning Business For Max Efficiency

There are plenty of reasons why you would want to start a cleaning business. In this post, you will learn how to structure a cleaning business (janitorial or commercial) for maximum efficiency. As your business grows, you need to establish your cleaning company organizational structure. 

While most cleaning businesses start off this way (you doing most of the work), you want to avoid this situation as you grow, especially in commercial services where its common to have hundreds of employees.

Not only does this way of doing business lead to burn out, but it is also a guaranteed way to fail eventually and create lots of stress in the process. What you want to create instead is a new layer so you are not dealing directly with 10 or 20 people but 2 or 3 managers/supervisors at most.

Optimal cleaning company organizational structure

Once you have 10 or more people working for your cleaning business, ideally you want to establish 3 departments: operations, sales, and administration. Instead of every employee reporting directly to you, they now report to the 3 managers and the 3 managers report to you.

Every business is unique and you can tweak the structure, but the concept is the same. It is recommended to establish this structure for your cleaning business as early as possible to avoid complications down the road.

1. Operations manager

This person handles the day-to-day operations of your cleaning business and will have all the supervisors, team leaders, technicians, specialty cleaners, and cleaning staff reporting directly to him/her. 

2. Sales person

This person (or several people) might have one or two assistants working for them setting appointments or sending out emails. Often, these can be part-time staff that either work inside sales setting appointments over the phone or outside sales or networker going door-to-door and attending events.

3. Administration

This person deals with finance and human resources. Ideally, the administration has two assistants: one bookkeeper and one human resources staff. The bookkeeper handles accounting while the HR staff deals with employee interviews, human resources, and fact-checking resumes.

While the bookkeeper can report to the administration, you can also choose to have the bookkeeper report directly to you. Some cleaning business owners like to keep the finances to themselves

Why establish a structure for your cleaning business?

A clear organizational structure makes a big difference to how well the cleaning business performs going forward. You can’t be in two places at once, and that is why you need to learn how to delegate.

As your cleaning company grows, and the team passes the amount of 10 to 15 people, it starts to become important how your group is structured. These are several points that need to be addressed:

• What roles are required
• What are the responsibilities of each role
• What are the business processes
• How is the information shared between the roles
• Who is responsible and accountable for what
• How does the company ensures a positive cash flow

Once these key points have been addressed, you can create an organizational structure for your cleaning business that runs like a well-oiled machine. A structure provides these following benefits:

1. Professionalism - A structure provides a degree of professionalism, where each function focuses on training and knowledge of the specific role with accordance to the responsibilities of the role. There is a clear owner for each and every task.
2. Performance indicators - Each role is set with its own Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Each function can be measured and scored. Every person know what’s expected from him or her, and can improve their performance accordingly. In turn, your company’s performance becomes predictable.
3. Future planning - Not only do your customers know what to expect, but you can also make decisions for the future, like buying more equipments and hiring more staff, knowing what the return will be. 

You need a structure and a proven business plan

Before you structure your cleaning business, you need to make sure you have a plan for growth. A cleaning business can certainly make you a lot of money without you having to invest a lot of cash in the beginning. It can start with only you, but you need the right business plan.

If you are serious about starting a cleaning business, I highly recommend the House Cleaning University course. The founder will teach you how to make $2,000 per week while planning for growth. Inside, not only will you learn how to land clients, but you will learn how to structure your cleaning business as well.

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