How To Start A Carpet Cleaning Business in 2022

The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the carpet cleaning industry will grow at 4.5% from 2019-2025. This growing data will surely take you one step closer to your dream of starting a carpet cleaning business. Moreover, this data also signifies that it is the ideal time to begin the journey.

But, how to start a carpet cleaning business? This question will trouble you the most. It feels overwhelming as there are many things to figure out. To help you start your own business in the carpet cleaning industry, I have shared a complete guide for small business owners. So, let’s get started.

What is a Carpet Cleaning Business?

The cleaning industry provides specialized carpet cleaning services in terms of removing stains, dirt, and allergens from carpets.

A carpet cleaning or upholstery cleaning business is a type of business that includes lower startup costs and enhanced flexibility. With the upholstery cleaning business’s help, you connect with your customers as a part of road meetings and provide carpet cleaning service to homes and offices.

So, carpet cleaning businesses require small investments and gain substantial profit margins, and enhance business productivity.

How to Start a Carpet Cleaning Business? (11 Simple Steps To Follow)?

To start a new carpet cleaning business, we have mentioned essential and easy steps you need to know as a business owner.

1. Trained and certified 

Before you enter market and provide services to clients, it is crucial for you to get training from experts for cleaning services. As this industry is built on trust such as client entrust you with their property, it is essential to be trained and professional. 

Therefore, you need to yourself trained and licensed in the carpet cleaning business starting. There are online-training courses from IICRC that help you to become a certified carpet cleaning technician, commercial carpet maintenance, and rug cleaning technician. 

Moreover, you can reach out to experts or business owners who are already into the carpet cleaning industry from long time. They will help you to provide insightful information and share on-the-job experience.

2. Write Your Business Plan

One of the first and foremost steps a carpet cleaning business owner has to take is writing a carpet cleaning business plan. A business plan plays a vital role in your carpet cleaning business. It represents the company description from beginning to end and mentions the business entity’s final goals.

To create a perfect and successful business plan for your carpet cleaning business, you must be ready to answer these questions:

• How to gain profit in my business?
• Who will be my target customers?
• How to bring the customers to my business?
• What are my financial goals?

Overall, a well-planned business plan will make a massive difference in carpet cleaning businesses’ growth and success.

3. Decide on Franchise or Solo

To start a new carpet business entity, you need to ensure that you are going to start your independent company or opt for a franchise.

The franchise helps the business owners who cannot take risks and are not interested in undergoing the trial-and-error process.

On the other hand, you have an option to initiate your cleaning business from scratch.

Running your company in your way is an ideal choice for individuals who can easily maintain complete control over all the business operations.

So, whatever the option you select, whether opting for carpet cleaning franchises or going alone, remember that both have their importance. The only thing that matters the most is the risks involved and the equivalent budget required to run a cleaning business.

4. Apply For Business License, Permits, and Insurance Policies

Once you have finalized the business location, you need to opt for the local state government’s business licenses and permits. However, many local governments provide cleaning business licenses to cleaners due to wastewater disposal.

The primary intent of having a business license is that your company gets protected from any criminal allegation. But, in addition to it, you can quickly grab the following advantages of having licenses and permits for your company, and they are:

• Legal protection
• Credibility
• Receive funding
• Small business taxes compliance

You can also contact your city, town, or county clerk’s office to find out about local licensing and permit requirements for cleaning businesses.

One of the best tips to apply to your carpet cleaning business is to consult with an expert professional for a small company attorney. He/she will advise you with the laws and rules to come out of a legal situation.

Business insurance is another important metric that helps your company protect startup assets when any property damage or an emergency or accident occurs. In addition to it, you can avail of the protection to:

• If something happens while working with customers
• Company property
• Rented carpet cleaning equipment
• Doing an advertisement for a business
• Offering professional tips

It becomes mandatory to know the types of insurance you can avail yourself of from multiple property insurance companies. It includes:

• Professional/General Liability Insurance
• Commercial Auto Insurance
• Property/Personal Umbrella Insurance
• Business owner’s policy (BOP)
• Worker’s compensation
• Data breach

5. Pick The Right Location For Your Business

Now is the time to decide on the location of your business. In the initial stage, you can efficiently work out of your home, but you need to opt for a large-scale area, depending on the carpet cleaner operating in your company as you grow your business.

Selecting the correct place for your carpet cleaning business is the most crucial decision you need to take. Location matters if you are planning to start your own carpet business as it affects:

• Income
• Expenses
• Overcall company success and failure

Moreover, you need to ask the following questions before selecting the location for a business:

• Is the population large enough to support the business?
• What is the current scenario of the business economy?
• How does the business influence the demographic factors?
• What is the value of your company in the competition?
• How competitive local businesses are?

6. Opening a Bank Account

Once all the legal formalities are completed, it’s time to open a business bank account for your carpet cleaning business. You need to make separate accounts for business banks and credit cards to manage the company and personal finances to track your business’s income and expenses.

It is important to note that managing your asset becomes complex to handle if personal and business accounts are mixed. There are even more chances of risk of your company getting sued, most commonly known as piercing your corporate veil.

With the help of a business credit card, you can easily separate personal and company expenses by including your business’ costs all in one place. Eventually, you can efficiently enhance the credit history of your company for raising money and investment.

By learning about building business cards, you quickly get credit cards and other financing options for their business names. In addition to it, they get better interest rates, better lines of credit, and more.

Once you open a business bank account, the personal assets such as cash flow are financially managed completely differently from company assets and are most essential for personal asset protection.

The accounting and tax filing process becomes more comfortable to include in your business structure.

7. Hire Employees

For starting a business, the essential thing. In addition, there you need to perform is hiring expert professionals in the company.

The expert professionals are nothing but carpet cleaners or individuals that possess strong carpet cleaning experience. You need to include pros that can easily clean carpets and provide window cleaning and home cleaning services.

According to a recent survey by PayScale, expert cleaners make an average of $13.20 per hour or $35,370 per year.

So, budgeting constraints related to employee salaries are of prime importance for you. It includes health insurance, unemployment contributions, paid time off, and even employee compensation expenses.

Before hiring employees in your business, you need to consider:

• Which are the specific skills that you are looking for?
• Are the employees aware of tasks they need to perform?
• How much does an employee cost?
• What are the employer’s key responsibilities?

8. Purchase your carpet cleaning tools and equipments

One of the crucial decisions to make is whether you will offer hot water and steam cleaning, dry foam cleaning, or dry chemical cleaning. No matter what method you choose, you need to purchase essential carpet cleaning tools and equipment. 

Hence you cannot run your carpet cleaning company if you don’t have right tools and equipments. Tools such as vacuum cleaner, spot cleaning solutions or detergents, carpenter rakes, and dry and steam carpet cleaner should be own by every businesses.

If you are start-up business starting a carpet company, you can rent few vital equipments which helps you to remove stain and dirt from the carpets. 

9. Decide your carpet cleaning services pricing strategy

Another important step of carpet cleaning service is to determine price and form  a pricing strategy. While the cost to start your business will depend on several factors, there are a few startup costs you’ll want to consider, including:

Cleaning equipment: The costs for cleaning equipment will depend on your cleaning method. If you plan to go the hot water extraction route, then plan to pay between $2000 and $4000 for a portable extractor. If you offer low moisture carpet cleaning, expect to shell out between $3000 and $8000 for the necessary equipment.

Cleaning supplies: Depending on the types of supplies you need and the volume of cleaning jobs you are tackling, monthly costs for detergent, stain removers, and cleaning solvents will start around $200 per month—and a higher volume of work can easily cost you thousands each month.

Registration and insurance costs: Depending on the business location, you have to pay somewhere in the $150 to $300 range for your initial business registration. You can also expect to pay another $200 to $1000 per year in insurance costs. It depends on your coverage.

Transportation costs: You will need transportation to get you and your equipment to and from jobs—typically a van or a truck, which, if you need to purchase, can run anywhere from $15,000 to $50,000.

Marketing costs: Marketing is one of your most variable costs; you can rely on word-of-mouth marketing and spend zero on marketing—or you can launch a large-scale digital advertising campaign and spend $20,000 in a month. Many new businesses fall somewhere in the middle, spending between $5000 and $10,000 on their initial marketing push.

Franchising fees: If you decide to open a carpet cleaning franchise, be prepared to pay up; between franchising and marketing fees, you can easily spend over $35,000 getting your business up and running.

The costs of starting a carpet cleaning business vary widely—but spending anywhere between $5,000 to $80,000 is a reasonable estimate.

10. Create your marketing plan to attract more customers

The primary intent of creating a marketing plan is to allow people to know your business. Here is what you can do: 

• Build a Business Website for your Carpet Cleaning Business 

Your Business website is the digital version of your office. 

Make sure to put relevant content on your website. The information that will help clients know more about you and your services. Your website should be easy to navigate and mobile-friendly.

Adding photos of your previous work and testimonials from previous clients will also help strengthen your reputation for prospects who are considering hiring you.

• Get your business listed on online directories

Online directories such as Google, YellowPages, Yelp, and Foursquare will make your business more accessible to new clients. People looking for service providers usually refer to these directories when looking for local companies. 

You can also go for directories like Angie’s List. All this will ensure that clients looking for carpet cleaners find you first before your competitors. 

• Learn about SEO

Businesses that appear on the first page of a Google search have more chances of acquiring customers than those on the second or third page. You can do this by making sure that your digital assets and content are SEO optimized.

Many consumers feel that businesses on the first page are more known, credible, and trustworthy. Hence, make your commercial carpet cleaning business appear on the first page not just once or twice, but thrice by:

• Registering on Google Business
• Running paid ads
• Getting listed on all major online directories
• Ensure your website is search engine optimized. Use keywords that customers are using to search for carpet cleaning businesses

11. Use carpet cleaning business software to schedule and dispatch jobs

The last and essential in this list is using carpet cleaning business software. It will help you to dispatch and schedule jobs and save your time which you used to spend doing it manually. The primary purpose of using it to help you schedule service request in a few clicks.

Moreover, it will improve communication between you and employees as they will easily get notificatio about assigned scheduled job with specific date and time. Also, you can take follow-up from clients through email.

By saving efforts, schedule software will streamline your carpet cleaning service process.

So, these steps must have answered your question about how to start a carpet cleaning business in the simplest manner. In case, if you still have any questions or queries, we have answered most asked questions from our readers.

Conclusion

We went through the steps that you as a business owner need to follow when you want to start a carpet cleaning business. We have discussed steps in detail, approximate cost of starting a carpet cleaning business, and equipment that is required to start the business. 

Once you start a carpet cleaning business, you can automate and streamline daily operations like job scheduling, job assigning, customer management, invoices and more with FieldCamp. This service scheduling software is mainly designed for service businesses to maximize the efficiency, gain complete business mastery and peace of mind.      

You no longer have to worry about scheduling jobs, processing payments and invoices as FieldCamp will take care of everything. Visit our website and sign up for a DEMO today.