Successful carpet cleaning businesses are mostly concerned with things other than the actual cleaning. Sure, the right chemistry, equipment, and tools can make a huge difference in your company’s ability to outperform and outshine your peers in the industry. But, you can also spend ridiculous amounts of money upgrading and making sure you have every single new tool offered in our industry and still not succeed. You can buy the very best brand new truck mount system and have it sit idle for months unless you focus on developing the ‘softer’ skills required to grow your carpet cleaning business.
Growing Your Carpet Cleaning Business
The truth is that only about 10% of a carpet cleaning company’s success can be attributed to their “tools” and actual carpet cleaning skill. An overwhelming amount of attention must be paid to other not-so-sexy topics to truly succeed in your cleaning business. Developing a plan of action, goals, company mission, core values and vision can give you way more of an edge than that brand new titanium wand everybody is drooling over. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of taking money and reinvesting it back into the business vehicle that’s spewing off cash for you and your family; but only after you’ve got plenty of success and the cash to do so.
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Many people come into the carpet cleaning industry with great salesmanship, marketing experience, formal education, and magnetic personalities. For the rest of us, I recommend taking a personal inventory of your own strengths and weaknesses in these areas, and get busy improving.
No matter how good you think you are, there is always more to learn and progress to be made that can and will elevate you and your business. In reality it takes about an hour or two on YouTube to learn the basics of cleaning carpets, but it can take a lifetime to perfect the truly pivotal skills that make a real difference (hint: none of which have a thing to do with questions like, “what’s the best pre-spray?”). Without a doubt the most powerful skill to develop when starting a carpet cleaning business is how to “connect” with people. Once you can truly and naturally make real connections with other human beings – the rest is easy.
Learning how to smile, listen, talk and get out of our comfort zones is how we can start to learn to truly connect with people and customers. Your future customers don’t really care how much you know when they know how much you care. Many carpet cleaning customers are treated simply as another customer. But, they are people, and every person is different. Learning how to connect and build a relationship with them is truly the #1 skill that can take the average cleaning business to the next level.
If you’re looking for a little help getting started with this effort, I have a recommendation… for me and many others, Dale Carnegie’s book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” helps to teach the art of true connection with others and is a must read for every newbie carpet cleaning entrepreneur. Give it a try!