If you are considering moving into the contract cleaning or commercial cleaning services market you are entering an extremely competitive arena of business. Not only are you in competition with the 150+ UK wide cleaning companies, there will also be several small to medium size cleaning companies operating in your area and then a myriad of one man band outfits.

You will have to attempt to break into this market, gain a foothold and expand. So how do you do it? Office cleaning is the most competitive and therefore the most difficult to break into. Perhaps best avoided? You will be told that to be successful you have to have a unique selling point. What will be unique about your services? If you are going into general cleaning then I think you will find it quite difficult to come up with a unique selling point for your services. Excellent quality? Totally reliable? Have a look around at your competitors, they all say the same things.

The only way to come up with an edge over any possible competition is to find a niche market that has not been exploited yet and market yourself on that. There are many areas of the market that have not yet been saturated with cleaners. However it is unlikely that your immediate area could provide sufficient work in your niche market to provide you with adequate income you would therefore have to be prepared to travel.

What niche markets are there? Computer cleaning, indoor plant cleaning, yacht cleaning (external and internal), natural stone cleaning, gravestone cleaning to name but a few. Research the market well before taking the plunge in one of those directions however. You may think there is a need for that particular specialism but your potential customers may not see the need. You could of course attempt to convince them of their need.

If you are fortunate enough to find a niche market then you must promote it from the point of fulfilling the needs of your clients or solving a problem for them. If they do not see a problem or a need then you have no hope.

You could of course take a lot of the hard work out of it and become a franchisee of a large company. This too has its pitfalls and in some cases it hardly feels as if you are self-employed and your own boss. You are doing all the work and they are reaping the dividends of that work. So if you decide to go that route then choose your franchising company with the utmost caution and only after you have conducted a wealth of research into them.