When you begin, you’ll most probably be working alone or with an assistant. Even with such a small team or solo operation, you can make up to $50,000 a year, provided you have a number of loyal clients.

However, do note that this figure is before you have paid any taxes or additional expenses.

The national average for a per-hour cleaning session is $25 to $40. While this may seem little, it tends to add up once you have a full day of work every day of the week.

Suppose you charge $30 an hour and work for 40 hours a week; that comes to $1200 a week. Multiply it by the number of weeks in a year, and your annual total comes to $62,400.

Now, if you take out your expenses from this amount, you can average close to $40,000 or $50,000 every year with just one cleaner.

But you’re likely to have fewer clients initially unless you’ve marketed your services well. In most cases, new cleaning businesses have five to six clients in the early stages and work around 20 hours every week.

As your client base grows and you bag over ten clients, your weekly hours could go up to 40. That’s the maximum we recommend you work with a single cleaner. Keep going at this pace for a year and recruit more employees with your savings.

More importantly, focus on advertisement and marketing to get more clients over the months.

Once you have grown your client base substantially to fill the weekly calendar, it’s time to hire more employees. Since you would have been providing cleaning services to these clients for a year, they’ll be more consistent, giving you the flexibility to board more members on your team.

When you hire more people for house cleaning and commercial services, you can add more hours to your week. Thus, it will increase your earnings, taking it closer to $100,000, depending on the number of employees in your team.

On the flip side, adding more members to the team means a higher expense since you have to pay them too. Thus, you need to find the sweet spot where the pros of recruiting more people outweigh its downsides.

For that, you should pay your employees around 70% of what you’re charging the client. For instance, if your hourly rate for residential cleaning is $40, pay your team $30.

If you want to increase your revenue significantly, step into commercial cleaning as you can charge a higher hourly rate than residential cleaning.

On average, a commercial cleaning business earns anywhere from $70,000 to above $100,000 every year. The higher income is mainly due to the fact that you can charge higher for cleaning commercial buildings.

Plus, if you secure long-term cleaning contracts, you can earn sufficiently even with a few clients, as opposed to residential cleaning that requires a vast clientele to be profitable.

For instance, if you’re hired by an office building for weekly cleaning, your monthly income from one job can be up to $1500. On the other hand, you’ll need about three residential clients to earn the same amount.

If you don’t have the capital to start a commercial cleaning business, begin with a house cleaning business instead. Save a certain percentage of your profit every year, and eventually, you’ll have enough to branch out to commercial cleaning.

First off, calculate your overall expenditure. It will include the cost of cleaning supplies, business license application and renewal, transportation to reach clients, taxes, and miscellaneous costs.

If you’ve been in the field for a few months, you’d have a clearer understanding of your total costs.

Now, determine the amount you’re making every month and subtract your expenses from it. For instance, if you make $4000 a month and the expenses are $500, your net income is $3500.

Thus, the highest salary you can pay yourself as a business owner is $3500.

A common mistake new business owners make is not saving for scalability. Just because you can give yourself the maximum salary doesn’t mean you should do so.

At this point, you should know what you plan for the future. Do you want to hire more employees by the end of the quarter or the year? Do you want to spend money on marketing to get new clients?

Keeping these things in mind, you can calculate the amount you need to save every month to have your desired sum at the end of the year. Likewise, if you want to buy commercial cleaning supplies sometime in the future or invest in a new vacuum cleaner, save accordingly.

Let’s say you want to save $1000 every month. In that case, your monthly salary will be $2500.

Now, it may seem little at the moment, but once you get more members on board and your marketing tactics bring in more clients, your monthly salary will also grow. As a new business, you should keep the bigger picture in mind.

When you’re in the service industry, your work ethic paves the trajectory for your growth. Cleaning services with a decent work ethic get consistent clients since their customership is happy with their service.

On the other hand, if you end up breaking a client’s valuable trophy or don’t lend an ear to their particular cleaning instructions, you’re bound to lose them. Having a good work ethic ensures repeated hiring from the same clients.

The cleaning services industry is all about networking. If you have a few steady clients, that’s no reason to stop networking. Make sure you are talking to the right people and partaking in cleaning-related community activities.

More importantly, leverage the power of social media and brochures to market your services because word-of-mouth can only do so much.

In today’s time, a business that doesn’t have a website isn’t doing things right. A website increases your credibility and puts an online presence to your name.

Even better, you can list your cleaning business on Google’s local businesses or show geo-targeted ads to make more people aware of your business.

As an independent contractor for home cleaning, you might not have the budget to run extensive marketing campaigns. But thanks to social media, you can publicize your cleaning business for free too.

Alternatively, distribute flyers in your locality to let people know about your existence. Also, make a website and put testimonials from previous clients on it.

Among all other forms of advertisement, word-of-mouth is the most impactful as people are more likely to believe their family and friends than the claims made by a business.

Thus, you should amp up your worth ethic to ensure you provide a stellar experience to new clients. Likewise, don’t let your quality of work drop, or your old clients will forsake you.

Ask your clients to refer you to their friends and family. It will not only bring you more work but will also let a significant number of people know about your business.

You can give your clients incentives for referrals. For instance, give 10% for referring a friend. In many cases, this is cheaper than running a whole marketing campaign.

If you lack the expertise or time to do certain tasks, such as manage your social media accounts or respond to client emails, hire a freelancer. It will give you peace of mind and at the same time ensure that someone skillful is performing important business activities.

More importantly, it will give you time to focus on expanding your business and networking.