Janitorial Services Business Plan

Clean Office Pros has selected the following priorities for its rollout strategy:

• To begin by targeting small offices to gain a foothold in the Kansas City office cleaning market.
• To leverage the reputation and experience from work with small offices to increasingly seek medium and large office clients in the third year of operation.
• To rapidly scale up organizational infrastructure, including cleaning crews, equipment, and vans.

Competitive Edge

Clean Office Pros will develop a competitive edge based on its utilization of the skills, ideas, and productivity of its employees. By encouraging and rewarding employee initiative and ingenuity to discover the best ways to clean well and smart, morale will be increased, making Clean Office Pros a more desirable place to work. The reputation of the firm as a great place to work will increase application rates and the strength of new hires, reducing the costs of turnover and training. Customer satisfaction will increase and costs will drop due to this focus on employee utilization.

Initial training by Reid Werbitt and Paul Vinci will be for cleaning crew heads. This will be ten hours of training in Clean Office Pros methods for experienced cleaning personnel. Cleaning crew heads will each provide ten hours of training, in turn, for new members of their cleaning crews when they are brought in to the business, based both on Clean Office Pros methods and basic cleaning skills (depending on the current skills of the crew member).

All client information about the cleaning will be transferred to a detailed job sheet which will be discussed with the cleaning crew head before reaching the job site. The cleaning crew head will go through a tour and inspection of the job site while the client is present to insure that the job sheet is complete and that all information about keys, security, and access is understood. Cleanings will always be run by a cleaning crew head and a crew of one to four members. After the crew have experience on a site, a cleaning crew head may move between a few job sites to supervise a greater number of jobs over one day.

Marketing Strategy

The marketing strategy for Clean Office Pros begins with its initial target market of small offices.

Promotional activities in the startup phase will include:

• Local Trade Show Booths at Office Services and Entrepreneurial trade shows
• Blogging, Newsletters, and Microblogging to establish Clean Office Pros as thought leaders in office cleaning
• Prospecting by phone to cold and warm leads
• Business networking to generate qualified leads
• Coupons for free trials for new businesses passed on through the local Small Business Development Center and Chamber of Commerce

From the startup period onward, the following promotional activities will be important:

• Search engine marketing through text ads around office cleaning keywords in the local area
• Search engine optimization to improve organic search rankings
• Yellow page listing
• Local TV commercials

These ongoing promotional activities are reflected as marketing expenses on the Clean Office Pros Profit and Loss statement.

Sales Strategy

Sales will be managed by co-founder Reid Werbitt. Reid Werbitt expects about ten small business clients from his previous work at JAN-PRO to move to Clean Office Pros upon learning of their value proposition. This will account for a starting base of clients for the business.

The sales process will begin with a short phone conversation to go over the basics of the services offered and to qualify the customer as one interested in regular cleanings. An in-person meeting at the customer’s office will follow, after which a proposal for a monthly rate for cleaning will be given. A follow up with the client will occur after the first three regular cleanings to get additional feedback and to continue to adjust the directions to the cleaning crew.

Before inquiries begin to come in through advertising, Werbitt will prospect for sales through business networking, cold calls, and warm calls. Clean Office Pros expects 5% of cold calls, 20% of warm calls, and 30% of networking leads to yield regular customers.

As a partner in the business, Werbitt will be compensated through a base salary, dividends and appreciation of the company’s stock. After two years of operation, an additional salaried salesperson will be hired who will be compensated for sales through quarterly bonuses and Werbitt will remain sales manager.

Sales Forecast

Growth is expected to speed up rapidly over the first two years as small-office customers are sought out and sold to. After the first two years growth will slow as operations must be continually increased to allow for greater growth. However, the additional target market of medium and large offices will be accessed starting in the third year of operation. Sales will be driven by the basic office cleaning service. Based on the previous success of Reid Werbitt as a seller of commercial cleaning, these projections are reasonable, as Werbitt sold $2 million in cleaning services in his last full year at JAN-PRO. The additional services will be sold as add-ons to clients who purchase office cleaning. It is estimated that 50% of clients will purchase some additional services.

The forecast is also supported by the fact that, after the first year of operations, medium offices will be targeted as well, increasing the rate of growth as each sale will bring a higher square footage of space to clean.

Direct costs include the labor of cleaning crew members and the cleaning crew head, cleaning supplies and gasoline or other transit costs for crew and equipment. Cleaning Crew Head supervision of jobs is expected to cost 5% of sales and Cleaning Crew (Hourly) wages for the execution of cleanings is expected to cost 27.5% of sales.

To ensure that sales are profitable, Werbitt will not be compensated on commission by sales, but by profits, after a reasonable base salary. This will keep gross margins around the industry average of 68%.

Milestones

Reid Werbitt will head the sales activities, including prospecting and networking to generate leads. Paul Vinci will manage the marketing and promotional activities including two trade shows (in January and February), the TV ad production (through a video production vendor), initial search engine optimization (through an SEO vendor), and the coupon campaign, which will cover three months of basic office cleaning for small-office clients.