The ultimate buyer's guide for janitorial business software

If you operate a janitorial company, you know the cleaning industry is brimming with competition. It’s a market of acquisitions and expansive services. For some, it’s an environment where their company can thrive, adapt to change, and branch out into new industries for success. For others, it’s a volatile market that can be hard to keep up with. 

Your daily operations can increase margins in your cleaning services company

Due to the rocky nature of the cleaning industry, tight margins in the janitorial market can make or break your business. This leads to a constant need to find new ways to:

• Increase profits

• Cut costs

• Acquire customers

One of the easiest ways of establishing ongoing growth without increasing spending or reducing costs is to optimize day-to-day operations.

Improve efficiency to make scaling your business effortless

Extremely efficient organizations find the rise in growth to be a smooth path. But if you’re still deploying the same management style as you did in the early days of your business, you’ll find struggles on the path to scale. 

Today’s post is about the keys to analyzing your business and pinpointing opportunities for optimized efficiency. 

See how commercial cleaning businesses can improve efficiency with Aspire in the below democast video from CleanLink.

Start with a holistic view of your commercial cleaning business

Business optimization and efficiency are about how a business conducts everyday operations. Every aspect of your janitorial services business affects how you produce revenue. It requires a complete picture that incorporates:

• Time

• Money

• Materials

• Labor

Your comprehensive view of your commercial cleaning business will likely include other resources not mentioned here.

A single area of deficiency in a commercial cleaning company can compromise the bottom line

When one or many of these elements are utilized inefficiently, it can drag down the entire process and hurt the bottom line of profit. To optimize them and become more efficient in every business area, you need to understand each element and its effect on your cleaning business’s day-to-day operations. 

The organization's growth becomes a constant barrier if businesses do not handle those processes.

Profitable companies can identify which elements are hurting the business but struggle to optimize them. Others cannot even analyze their business on a granular enough level to determine the inefficient factor. 

Janitorial business owners need analytics backed with hard data to scale

A big-picture analysis is vital to helping your company optimize growth. Understanding the bigger picture and how each aspect of your operations feeds into it will help you pinpoint loose ends precisely.

To do this, you’ll need an analysis of several factors to monitor your efficiency, including these must-have factors:

• Data

• Workload

• Costing 

• Visibility

Now let’s dive into what it takes to make those efficient.

Align data for your cleaning company

Your data is your track record, proof of value, and credibility. Not many would understand how data could be an integral part of business in the service trades. The truth is that data is the backbone of thriving companies that are able to optimize their commercial cleaning services.

To fuel growth, your data systems must be fully supported and organized. 

Whether you focus on one cleaning service or a plethora of capabilities, everything your business manages must filter through one line of data.

From the tools you use to the different companies you serve, you shouldn’t have to switch dozens of tabs to get to the right place to find your analytics. 

Commercial cleaners can do more with data insights

A centralized hub for your data is best for upkeep and analyzing your business success. Fully optimized information means you’ll know how well any given job went, who completed it, the labor costs, and how much you profited.

It may not seem worth the extra effort to track minute details at the beginning of your business, but this type of historical data pays dividends when it comes to expanding business.

Position your cleaning business for growth beyond janitorial services

Imagine you’re seeking to expand your company into recreational cleaning. 

• How are you going to identify costs?

• How will you understand what new cleaning equipment you’ll need and the upkeep required?

• How many new janitors will you need to hire?

Even something as simple as knowing how many team members you’ll need to assign to a job can decide your ability to transition to that new service successfully. 

Your data determines your success in expanding your professional cleaning services

If you've adequately tracked it, you can find all the insight you need to answer the above questions in your historical data.

• Compare past jobs to facilities with similar equipment or requirements

• Look into how much effort it took to complete a job of a similar size

• Make a clear decision about what it takes to expand into the new market

Comprehensive data about your company’s cleaning practices will help you prove your value in untapped markets to fight customer skepticism. 

Optimized workloading and accurate job costing 

Without your team, your company would go nowhere. They are integral to your business and a reflection of its growth.

If you don’t have insight into your team management, you’re sorely missing a key growth area in your optimization analysis. 

Gain insight into employee productivity for discrete cleaning processes

Investing in your teams and business structure is always vital to growth, but you’re only making a half-baked investment without full insights.

Aligning to your data stream should provide insight into every aspect of your team and their work.

• How much does it cost to send one person out on a job?

• How easy is it to build out schedules and routes to optimize workflow?

• What are the costs of tools to speed up processes?

• When should you buy cleaning equipment vs. sending out more janitors? 

These are all things you want to look into when analyzing your day-to-day operations, but it requires a system of tracking that is comprehensive enough to provide the answers.

Understand how to make the most of every cleaning team on your staff

If you’re still setting schedules on an individual basis, you’re going to miss out on significant cost savings. Consider a cleaning staff with poor routing efficiencies.

You may need to hire more staff simply because your existing janitors can’t cover the growth rate of new accounts.

When your management team has a clear insight into routing—a critical factor in understanding costs—they can organize existing cleaning teams to protect new accounts in the same amount of time. 

Use data reports to optimize profitability from every cleaning team

Seeing your entire team's workload at any moment is the only way to optimize your management. Sometimes enough equipment means any job can be done with one set of hands.

• But does additional equipment save you on the costs of new employees?

• How does your labor tracking support that answer?

Understanding how all these aspects of workload management tie together makes it clear that you need a holistic view of your labor strategies.

Comprehensive data reporting benefits you as you expand. You’ll understand your team's capabilities and their exact cost. As mentioned, the key is ensuring your data tracking can cover all these insights and be browsed in one central view. 

Empower productivity with greater visibility

What this all should amount to is clear visibility. It’s not about being able to micro-manage your business or monitor who’s slacking or performing.

Visibility is about access, so anyone on your team can get the information they need to optimize the business from their role.

• Team managers can perform on-the-fly scheduling with clear insight into who’s available and best for the job

• Financial officers can track costs and ensure you’re not taking on any jobs for which your company isn’t financially prepared

• Get shipment orders ready in advance so you’re not waiting until the week to analyze your costs

Visibility is the secret to optimizing your business processes.

Your company’s work environment becomes an aligned unit where people focus on implementing the expertise for which they were hired.

A single element of your operations can impact other areas of business. Even worse, it hampers the ability to grow the business and optimize profits.

Get ahead of change and drive growth on your terms

Growth is the most critical factor in a successful business. When companies genuinely understand every area of their business and optimize each one, they can grow successfully. Business owners have confidence in their data for making firm business decisions.

Growth only occurs if you can scale your business while acquiring new clients and increasing profit margins. 

One of the ways to gain visibility is to invest in technology designed specifically for janitorial market growth. More and more janitorial companies see the need for technological support that grows and scales with them, regardless of how large they become.

Growth can be a bumpy journey with plenty of hard business decisions along the way. Making informed, data-driven decisions minimize growing pains. A cloud-based solution with integrated and correlated data across business processes and optimization tools enables you to fast-track growth without disrupting your current business flow.

To learn more about how a software solution can transform your commercial cleaning business, read "Save time and win more bids with janitorial estimating software."