—–Original Message—–
From: M
Sent: Friday, June 25, 2004 12:58 PM
Subject: how do I change?

Hi! I have had a small cleaning business for the past 14 years. I clean houses myself but I would like to expand and hire some employees, but I have a fear. I am trusted by all of my clients and don’t want to take the chance that I would send someone into their home and they would steal from them. I would like some information on how to go about expanding my business. I want to be able to stop cleaning and just supervise my employees. I would appreciate any information you can give me. Thank you.

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By Chris Lude, Co-Owner of Denver Concierge.

Our most notable bad debt losses have always resulted from our own lapses of judgment.

On a day with some slack in our schedule, a realtor calls up and asks us to clean an empty house in a rush for an open house she is doing tomorrow. We ask who will pay, and she says, “Send me a bill for whatever the charges.” All the signs were there; anyone taking notice needn’t have waited three months for our final collection letter being returned undelivered to have recognized this as being indefensibly uncollectible. Of course we knew better, but we had some slack in the schedule and we filled it–another bad debt, and nothing to do in this instance except blame ourselves.

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When I accepted the position for the Alliance, I had a long talk with the HCA staff about “agenda.”We all harmonized on this: Raise the level of awareness that house cleaning .keeping .is, indeed, a profession, and its potentials will grow remarkably through commitments to professionalism.

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By Chris Lude, Co-Owner of Denver Concierge.

—–Original Message—–
Sent: Thursday, May 27, 2004 11:58 AM
To: Chris Lude
Subject: info

hello

I am in the process of starting a new cleaning business and as I was looking over the websites I came to yours. I would like to know if there is any information or help you can give me to start a cleaning practice like yours here. For instance when you first started was it just two of you and then the company grew or did you go into it at a large scale. We have ideas of making it larger eventually but thought starting off slow would be the best thing since we have not done this before. Any info you can give on figuring out price quotes would also be helpful. Thank you for your time.

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Background and Description

The HCA Automatic Pricing Tool (“HCA Pricer”) represents a system for predicting the time required (“HCA Clean Time”) to professionally clean a human-occupied primary residence (“Household”), based on a Household’s attributes (“HCA Pricer Attributes”), the number of individuals involved in the cleaning process (“Team Size”), the efficiency factors for the actual individuals involved in the cleaning process (“Efficiency Factors”), quality factors for the actual individuals involved in the cleaning process (“Quality Factors), frequency of cleanings (“Frequency”), which is measured in days between regularly scheduled cleanings.

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Suddenly the house cleaning industry is awash in know-it-alls. So let me begin by saying we obviously don’t. All we can offer is what has worked for us, and our experiences seem to be remarkably different from what is being sold as gospel by the house cleaning industry’s gurus.

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I’d Rather be Golfing

I would prefer to play golf than do in-home price quotes–I am really tired of doing them. So I can’t dispute all the good reasons for skipping them. However, for those who are still on the fence, let me explain the reasons I still keep choosing them over golf:

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by Chris Lude, Co-Owner of Denver Concierge.

Putting together operating forecasts is an important first step in deciding to start an independent or franchise maid service. Yet, too many entrepreneurs embark without bothering to prepare an operating forecast or understand the investment requirements and operating costs associated with a new venture. If such entrepreneurs had a better understanding of such elements before they embarked, those lacking funding might have second thoughts, and those with funding might make more intelligent decisions about pricing from the outset.

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You can buy books telling you what a low investment, high growth opportunity residential house cleaning can be. We believe that the house cleaning’s 50% per annum failure rate speaks for itself. It is an attractive industry, but it is the potential for limitless scale and profits from cleaning nice homes, not the misconception about low investment, which makes it attractive. Most certainly the industry does require a low level of investment relative to many specialty retail, restaurant or manufacturing industries, and it has fantastically greater potential for scale, but it is irresponsible for experts to tout prospects for high growth and profits based on an operating model of operating from home with a cell phone and a bucket.

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Managing equipment is like brushing teeth . . . in time, the negligent are left with nothing to worry about.

For maid service operators, the cost of equipment and supplies is a pittance in comparison to the cost of labor. So some operators don’t bother themselves a lot with controlling equipment damages and losses.

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