Consider some of the positive aspects of the cleaning business. As you read these, compare and understand how very different these advantages are from those of most businesses:

• I can’t state this loudly enough – janitorial is high-profit, repeating income. When you do a good job for your customers, you get new checks from them month after month, year after year.
  
  
• You can start it very part-time with very little money. You don’t even have to buy a single piece of cleaning equipment until you have your first contract signed up.
  
  
• You can run it from your home, giving you the lowest possible operating costs and all kinds of home-office and self-employment tax deductions.
  
  
• Every building needs cleaning. The customer base is unlimited.
  
  
• Janitorial is recession-proof. My business has never stopped growing, even during the worst financial times.
  
  

Remember the 2001 recession? The January 2002 issue of Cleaning & Maintenance Management Magazine has an article called "What Recession?”, and while the article is 6 years old, it does show how recession-proof janitorial is. The article is based on a poll called the Contract Cleaner's Statistical Survey.

• 57.6% of the respondents said their sales increased an average of 20.7% over the previous year's sales.
• Incomes of owners of commercial janitorial services rose 15.3%, increasing to an average of $85,600 per year.
• Commercial office-cleaning services are consistently the most profitable type of maintenance and cleaning business.             
• The respondents were overwhelmingly independent business owners (only 7% reported being a franchise).

• You can “duplicate” yourself and multiply your efforts by hiring employees to do the work for you. You can have a “full-time” business, yet work “part-time” hours.
  
  
• You don’t need to buy any of the things that most businesses require – no lease on an office, no storefront, no display cases, no inventory.
  
  
• You can run your business in the evenings and weekends, after your regular working hours. It doesn’t require that you quit your day job. Or you can do what I did back in 1978 – after building my business for a year I was making double my day-job wage, so one day I told my boss that I was “firing” him!
  
  
• You have multiple sources of income because you have multiple customers.
  
  
• Once you’ve signed up a new customer, he’s “in the can”. You continue to service his building every month, and he writes you new checks every month. Compare this to a real estate agent or a car salesman who may never sell another house or car to the same person again. They need fresh names and faces every day!
  
  
• Cleaning office buildings is much easier than house cleaning, because there are no kids or pets to clean up after, and there are very few “cleaning surprises” in office buildings. If you want to go crazy, try cleaning people’s homes!
  
  
• Cleaning isn’t a “fad” business; it’s been around forever, and always will be.
  
  
• Janitorial is a $75 billion dollar industry in the U.S., and continues to grow every year.
  
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