Whether you’re just setting up a cleaning business from scratch or expanding your cleaning services, you’ll need to have a clear idea of the cleaning service types offered in the market. While these cleaning service types have distinct tasks, they also have overlapping qualities, equipment, and customers. For example, you can have a customer who needs a deep cleaning service for their home.
Impressed by your quality of work, they want to refer you to their office administrator for a commercial cleaning service. Or, the same customer needs some laundry and dry cleaning work bi-weekly.
Because you will need specialized equipment, cleaning products, and additional crew members, you must take commercial cleaning jobs seriously to ensure their completion without hiccups. Commercial cleaning represents and golden opportunity, but you can not undertake that opportunity lightly. In other words, you need a clear understanding of what every cleaning service type entails before you dive in headfirst.
Did you know? The U.S. cleaning services market contributed around $55 billion of the revenue in 2020 and is expected to grow over 52% by the end of 2021 due to the airborne COVID spread.
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7 Common Types Of Cleaning Services
Read on to see an overview of 7 common types of cleaning services that you can provide your customers.
Residential Cleaning Services
Residential cleaning, also known as domestic or household cleaning, is cleaning a customer’s home when they are present or currently out of the house. When customers spend their hard-earned money on domestic help, it frees up more time to spend with their families instead of having to fuss over household chores.
- Crew: It is your choice to fly solo or hire employees as household cleaning jobs tend to be small and manageable
- Opportunity: A Statista Report shows that the household cleaners market is estimated to grow up to $40.38 billion by 2025
- Services: Depends on the client you choose, but common cleaning services for this category are room cleaning, kitchen cleaning, bathroom cleaning, vacuuming, and dusting. As your client profile increases, you can offer add-ons like washing, ironing, tidying, deep cleaning, and more
- Cost: With a low barrier to entry, your startup cost will be pretty low
- Equipment: You can use your own cleaning products or request clients to supply them
Commercial Cleaning Services
Commercial cleaning services, also known as office cleaning, perform cleaning services for commercial buildings such as office spaces, schools, community buildings, and more. The cleaning can be scheduled either during the working hours when premises are open or outside of working hours when premises are closed.
- Crew: You will definitely need a team since offices tend to be a lot larger in area than the average home and, while profitable, generally tend to be time-consuming to clean
- Opportunity: A recent report on cleaning services shows that among the various types of cleaning services available, commercial cleaning services have the record for the highest expected revenue with a CAGR of 5.8%
- Services: Common services include carpet care, upholstery care, wiping, windows washing, dusting, vents and air duct cleaning, toilet cleaning, and more
- Cost: Because this is a competitive market, your investments will be higher since you will need specialized cleaning equipment, a crew, and transportation. Some states require businesses to get proper licensing before starting commercial cleaning services to offset any risks inherent to the business.
- Equipment: While a few office spaces have cleaning equipment of their own, usually, it is up to the service provider to go in prepared
Janitorial Cleaning Services
Although most people tend to use janitorial and commercial cleaning services as synonyms or think one is a subset of the other, they are very different. Janitorial cleaning services cover everyday ongoing maintenance and cleaning of buildings like office spaces, schools, industries. In contrast, commercial cleaning involves bigger, deep-cleaning tasks performed once a few times a year.
- Crew: It is advisable to have a team in place before offering specialized cleaning services since there is a steady stream of work coming in
- Opportunity: A recent study on the Global Janitorial Service values the market size $252.79 million in 2019, estimated to grow at a compound annual rate of 3.1% within 2027
- Services: It covers the typical building and premises maintenance activities such as dusting, mopping, sweeping, garbage disposal, air duct cleaning, changing bulbs, refilling tissues, and more
- Cost: Investment and cost spent may fluctuate based on the application you choose (residential, commercial, or industrial) to offer and the equipment you decide to use
- Equipment: You can choose to buy specialized cleaning equipment and products or decide to stick with good-old hand cleaning
Laundry and Dry Cleaning Services
Although they may sound similar, laundry cleaning and dry cleaning are pretty different from each other. While laundry cleaning uses soaps, detergents, and softeners to wash clothes, dry cleaning uses high-end chemicals to remove persistent stains and grease from clothes.
- Crew: You will need a team since a laundry business requires a premises, and dry cleaning requires proper technique
- Opportunity: The global dry-cleaning and laundry services market, valued at approximately $118.9 billion in 2018, is predicted to hit a booming $180 billion by 2022
- Services: While the equipment and articles cleaned remain constant, services are provided in various ways. You can either offer a self-service laundry cleaning or hire a team to do it for your customers. Additionally, you can offer fluff and fold, dry cleaning, or a variety of other services
- Cost: Initial investment can be little or a lot depending on your choice of location, staff, equipment, and other aspects
- Equipment: You can choose to clean clothes manually or invest in assets like industrial laundry machines
Sanitization and Disinfection
In this COVID age, it is critical to keep both homes and offices free from harmful viruses and bacteria that can cause allergies, colds, and coughs. Sanitization and disinfection use physical and chemical means to ensure that our dwellings and office spaces are safe for human inhabitation and cut the COVID chain.
- Crew: While the guidelines to be followed are not as strict as the medical sterilization process, it is better to have a team of qualified cleaners
- Opportunity: Under current circumstances, there is expected to be a surge in demand for the Disinfection and Sanitizing Services Market from a baseline of $612.91 million(2019) to a colossal $1,121 million in 2020
- Services: While both are a form of decontamination, they differ in application and result. While sanitization mechanically removes microbes and reduces the number of bacteria on a surface or equipment, disinfection destroys viruses, bacteria, and fungi that are present on inanimate objects
- Cost: While it doesn’t cost much to start offering sanitization services, it does require a considerable amount of specialized training to get the job done effectively
- Equipment: With technological improvements introduced in the market, it is paramount to stay on top of those changes and adapt to them
Green Cleaning Services
Nowadays, the term “green” represents a movement to save our planet and ecosystem as a whole. The entire aspect of this type of cleaning service is to do more (cleaning) with less (chemicals). Supporting green cleaning services can help align businesses with their customer’s values and show a sense of social responsibility.
- What’s more, most governments and commercial businesses consider green cleaning services to be worth the investment, but only when properly certified. While there are many green-cleaning services available, Green Seal and ISSA certifications are the most popular certifications.
- Opportunity: According to a recent Neilsen report, today’s consumers are considering sustainability as a shopping priority and are willing to pay extra for sustainable offerings
- Advantages: Governments around the world understand the need for eco-friendly services and, as a result, provide an array of financial incentives to cleaning service providers who take the green cleaning route
- Crew: While you can use your existing crew to perform green cleaning services, you may have to educate them on green cleaning practices and train them on the use of green cleaning supplies and equipment
- Cost: Like other cleaning services, you can easily start a green cleaning service with a small investment. However, specialized green cleaning products can increase the money spent on cleaning supplies
- Equipment: Businesses who want to get more done with less need to invest in high-performance cleaning equipment that is much more secure, reliable, and advanced than their traditional counterparts
Pressure Washing Services
Pressure washing cleaning service is the process of using a powerful stream of water (from a high-pressure water spray like a jet or power washer) to clean dirt-ridden carpets, moldy buildings, loose paints on walls, grime-filled objects, muddied vehicles, and other usually hard to clean surfaces.
- Crew: With the right equipment, you would neither need too many people on your crew nor would they require extensive training to perform their tasks
- Opportunity: The global pressure washing service market was estimated to be USD 1.88 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach USD 2.03 billion by 2025
- Services: Typically, pressure washing service providers take care of specific external cleaning tasks such as tidying up concrete parking areas and driveways and washing high-end industrial machinery used for mechanical, transportation, manufacturing, and food processing tasks
- Cost: As opposed to other professional cleaning services, pressure washing demands a considerable amount of initial investment for the pressure washing gear, trailer, chemicals, operational permits, license expenses, and insurance costs
- Equipment: To make your customers trust in your ability, you need to have the best pressure washing gear, which costs a pretty penny
Conclusion
Growth and strong customer loyalty are top priorities in most small and medium cleaning business companies across the globe. Still, not enough cleaning business owners focus on expanding their cleaning service offerings to take advantage of novel opportunities and strengthen their existing customer relationships.
Too few owners focus on expanding their offerings to tap into new opportunities to grow and strengthen customer relationships. Understanding your competitors’ services and paying attention to your customers’ needs helps identify niche services to offer and makes your business more competitive!
Do you know of any other types of house cleaning services that we can add to this list? Feel free to pitch in and share your experience. (extraneous) The list is not comprehensive, and there are more cleaning services that we could add to this list. Join us next time; we will discuss the top types of cleaning services you can offer based on the pricing model.
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