First off, congratz on your venture. That's a leap most people will never take. So props to you.
The issue was you couldn't produce enough income to replace coorporate America salary in time, and had to go back.
The cleaning biz, commercial and residential, has to be one of the hardest service businesses to run right now. I have multiple friends that have gotten out of the cleaning business (commercial and residential). Some last year, more this year.
I still know a few that are functioning in the commercial sector, but they have pivoted. They're doing COVID cleans, window cleaning, pressure washing (exterior cleaning) which is what we do.
Like anything, you just have to adapt to the current climate. There will always be changes that destroy businesses. Most don't survive because they get lazy.
If you're intent on running the cleaning biz (I think you can still make tons of $ here, more than enough to replace salary), I would first focus on hiring. Because you can do the back end work (scheduling, customer back and forth, quotes etc) from your coorporate job. Then you can send employees on the jobs and collect the $ off top.
You're actually in a further ahead position than I was when I started, because when I started, I had zero dollars to my name. I literally could not afford to hire someone to do the job for me, I had to do it myself. I would have failed if I had hired off the bat. But you can use your coorporate salary, ESPECIALLY if you're working from home, as a sort of "passive income" to work on your cleaning biz. You can easily multi task.
Get on Google Guarenteed (Local Services). Get on Yelp, start running Yelp ads @$750/mo. If you can't close jobs in the first month there's something wrong. You should go in the green within a few weeks.
If you can't, I would pivot to exterior cleaning in your city. Basically the same biz I'm doing. We have not had an issue with COVID at all this year. In fact, if anything, it's helped us immensely. People are home. Working on projects they've put off for 2, 5, 10 years. We wear a mask when greeting the customer, or do a contactless service (person stays inside, communicate by phone). Either way works for us! Collect the $ through check under door mat, cash, or in your case, Venmo, PayPal, Credit Card (stripe). Use whatever you can to figure it out. If you need more help let me know. Go watch my YT vids on how to perform the services so you can make sure your contractors know what they're talking about.
Best of luck. Hope you crush it. Time to get this biz off the ground once and for all.
David
First, thank you for taking the time to respond. Since COVID, do you think that people are still not wanting people in their homes cleaning? Now that people are home more, would they really want to pay and have someone come in and clean? So what you're saying is that I should hire immediately and I do the backend work?
I am definitely going to check out your YT channel.
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