How Janitorial Software Can ‘Level the Playing Field’ for Your Cleaning Business

Today’s commercial and residential cleaning businesses are lucky. Really, here’s why.

The playing field in the cleaning industry has been effectively leveled by innovative, intuitive software designed to give small or even start- up cleaning companies the online and mobile tools needed to quickly and successfully compete with much larger building services contractors – even those having hundreds of employees or doing millions in sales.

In the past, cleaning business owners hoping to grow a large and profitable company might have reasonably expected to face years engaged in a painful, uphill battle to get the kind of information and tools necessary to look and operate as professionally as their larger cleaning counterparts.

No more.

While experience is, and will always be, important – sometimes, in some things, it can be dramatically reduced in importance or even replaced altogether by the use of the right business tools, in this case, the software available to cleaning companies today.

That’s right; the years of painful struggle have been largely eliminated by online, mobile tools. Effectively programmed with pre-loaded production rates, cleaning schedules, pricing formulas and contract templates – these software programs can not only take away the ‘big guys’ advantage but even ‘tip the scales’ in favor of smaller, newer cleaning business if the competition isn’t armed similarly.

And, that can happen – big companies move slowly. Cleaning companies are no exception.

Fortunately, for today’s motivated cleaning business owners, who want to quickly move up in the ranks of successful cleaning business in their market, this can be a game-changing disadvantage they can capitalize on.

But, they’ll need to move fast.

Even big, slow-moving companies know today’s high-tech, fast-changing business environment can quickly identify, isolate and then punish companies who fall behind – no matter how big.
The list of major companies, even those with familiar, household names, who missed or failed to react decisively in the face of dramatic technology shifts, who are now either gone altogether or, if not quite gone, are mere ghosts of their former selves – is long.

Big cleaning businesses are no exception – and they know it, making the window of opportunity for eager cleaning businesses wanting to ‘leapfrog’ ahead of their larger competitors shorter than ever.

However, the good news is progressive cleaning business owners who utilize online, cloud based software on their Smartphone or tablet device have reported prospects being at the very least curious and often – impressed.

Stories of cleaning business owners pointing to the use of the latest business software and the professional image and documents it can create as one of the primary reasons given for landing a new account – are not uncommon.

But, the use of today’s intuitive, user-friendly software does more than delight the user – it sends a message.

Prospective building owners and property managers often take their impressions regarding the professionalism and credibility of the software they see being used and project or assign similar positive qualities to the user of the software.

In a highly competitive marketplace like cleaning, being able to differentiate or set your company apart from you competition on something other than price – is critical. Cleaning business software can be one of the fastest, easiest and most cost effective ways to do just that.

Identifying and integrating the best business software can prove to be a game-changing advantage to those forward thinking cleaning business owners who are looking to identify and leverage every competitive edge they can find.

Let’s look at an example, not in cleaning.

The growing trend today towards offering higher education by having the very best university professors teach college courses online, is not only promising – as a way of cost effectively distributing education and leveraging the best instructors to maximize results and minimize costs, but serves as an example of a strategy designed to leverage today’s technology to create a better ‘mousetrap’ – one that serves clients, in this case, students better and at a lower cost.

But don’t expect all the tenured university professors to like it – they won’t.

Similarly, don’t be surprised to hear old-school cleaning business owners grousing about the new technology either- and how it can never replace the traditional ‘school of hard knocks’ education they earned in the cleaning business over the course of 30 years.

It’s understandable.

It can be hard for someone who struggled for years to find the answers needed to achieve a certain level of success – to see today’s cleaning business owners getting software essentially handed to them that not only short-cuts the process of learning the cleaning business – but may, in fact, provide better formulas than the crude, rules-of-thumb procedures relied on by many in the past.

Again, it’s natural, but as hard as they try and as much as they complain, in the end, it’s not going to change a thing. It’s not going to stop the way software is revolutionizing the way cleaning businesses owners run and grow their companies.

For example, janitorial bidding software can effectively eliminate the need to spend years of painful trial and error learning to calculate how long an office building should take to clean or how to price a tile maintenance job.

Janitorial software can definitely level the playing field for cleaning businesses, but, if and only if they identify and utilize it while it still remains a competitive advantage.