Starting a new carpet cleaning business from scratch includes little risk. In fact, every business is risky when it is has a new startup. Many things are there, that need to plan, sort, and prepare before you jump into the industry of business.
Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs do not properly prepare themselves and their new businesses to succeed. As per the Small Business Association, fifty percent of new businesses fail during the first five years.
Owning a carpet cleaning business start-up and taking it to a prominent position is not just a piece of cake. Understanding the cause, why 50% of the new business close, and avoiding those reasons, may just keep your business away from failure.
The entrepreneur may be unaware of what is happening in their business and before they acknowledge, it might be too late. If the entrepreneur knew of the problem, they might have saved the business. One of the main reasons why carpet cleaning business fails is because of the entrepreneur. Here are different reasons:
Why Carpet Cleaning Business Fails? What Are The Main Reasons?
1. No Business Plan
There is a well-known quote by Benjamin Franklin:
“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”
Just thinking it through is not enough; you need to take initiative and plan down your business. This allows you to focus more on your carpet cleaning business plan and work out more on the area of concern. It helps you to identify with your business and the specific service you are providing, as well as legal and financial aspects.
Some of the things you should be showing in your plan:
- Location of your business (office or home-based office)
- Who are your customers and how will you reach them?
- What’s your competition and how you will tackle them?
- How many people you are planning to employ and how you will manage the hiring and training procedure?
- What team will you have – a management team or an advisory team?
- Will you have an exit plan or a backup plan?
- You will need a financial plan to forecast 1 year, 3 years and 5 years of sales, cash flow, expenses, etc.
- Update your business plan on a yearly basis.
Learn More: Tips to Start a Successful Carpet Cleaning Business
2. No Marketing plan
Actually, the marketing plan fails under no business plan but it is an important issue, let us see it separately. You need to consider a few things when developing your marketing plan. How to market a carpet cleaning business?
- Which area will you be targeting in the market (office buildings, schools, retail, industrial, medical, commercial, and residential)?
- What type of services will you provide (upholstery cleaning, rug cleaning, steam carpet cleaning, dry carpet cleaning, etc.)?
- What will be your market location?
- Have you set your marketing budget?
- What methods of marketing and advertising will you implement?
- What is the timeline for each activity?
Learn More: 11 Carpet Cleaning Marketing Ideas – With Infographics
3. Avoiding Digital Marketing
Many carpet cleaning business owners may avoid digital marketing. They believe that they do not have time and money for digital marketing. As a result, they stick to basic forms of advertising and wait for customers.
Digital technology has made information more convenient for consumers. As there are millions of internet users online and searching for a business like yours, avoiding digital marketing can be a reason why carpet cleaning business fails.
Learn more: Digital Marketing: An Ultimate Way To Kickstart Your Small Business!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing are some digital marketing methods that can help you reach customers online.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you do not imply SEO in your digital marketing strategy, you are losing those valuable customers.
Having a website that is optimized to rank higher in the search engine result pages and increasing organic traffic is known as search engine optimization. It allows you to engage with your prospects.
Although SEO takes time for top rank in organic search results, the results are strong and sustain for a long time. If you do not have time for SEO, you can hire an SEO agency.
Learn More: How is SEO Useful for Branding?
- Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
You only pay when a user clicks on your ad. This is known as PPC advertising. Google Ads is the most used PPC advertising platform. It gives you full access to control your Ads. Moreover, it helps you reach a large number of users online.
To gain quick results on top of the search engine results page, Google Ads is the best option.
Learn More: Google AdWords – how it is beneficial for a carpet cleaning business?
4. No Website & No Social Media Presence
As per the latest reports from Statista: “In 2018, the United States had close to 275 million internet users. This figure is projected to grow to 310.1 million internet users in 2022. The United States is one of the biggest online markets worldwide”.
Because of millions of internet users, does it make sense to run a business without a website?
How will you reach your customers?
How will people get to know what you offer?
Without a website and social media presence, no business can succeed in this fast-growing Internet world. Research says that “Today around seven-in-ten Americans use social media to connect with one another, engage with news content, share information and entertain themselves.”
No website and no social media lead to no online presence. If you don’t have a website and your competitors have, then this may be another reason for your business to fail.
Nowadays people’s research online before buying a product or service. A well-designed website provides a gateway for your potential customers to easily find your carpet cleaning business online. Customers can gain information about your services and how to reach you.
Learn More: Tips While Designing a Carpet Cleaning Website
Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and many more platforms helps your carpet cleaning business to stay in touch with customers. Besides, you need to have social media profiles on the platforms your customers are. You can provide offers and discounts to customers using your website and social media.
5. Less Fund
Many carpet cleaning companies start on a shoestring budget. However, if you are focused and dedicated to your business, you will require some bugs to cover the daily expenses. Your business should also have the ability to save bank loans for unwanted financial conditions or emergencies.
Start with research, calculating for startup costs for a carpet cleaning business. Some things that need to consider are cleaning supplies, cleaning products, vehicles, equipment, office supplies, account, marketing cost, and many more.
Hiring employees will also incur extra business costs that you need to consider. Recruiting, administration, testing, orientation, and training not to mention wages, all add up quickly.
Like these, you must think about many other expenses.
6. Poor Leadership
Running a Carpet Cleaning Business is not an easy task. Poor leadership skills can fail your business. Leadership skills include taking the right decisions at the right time. If you do not have adequate experience from financial management to staff management, then you may drive your business towards failure.
If you do not have control over your staff, or they do not consider your decisions, or you and your supervisors are arguing with each other in public, or during times of emergency, you get confused and cannot make quick decisions, then these are the signs of poor leadership skills.
The most successful entrepreneurs learn, study, and reach out to mentors to improve their leadership skills.
To avoid leadership failure, you need to reach out to mentors, learn, study, and join training programs. For proper business growth, a leader should have the ability to manage and plan.
7. Growing Too Fast
Most of the carpet cleaning companies are taking any job that is coming just because to earn money. If you got success initially then it is great, because very few businesses experience rapid income growth. So make sure you always think twice before making any decision.
It is exciting, but in this excitement, you forget your customers. Due to this, you can lose your customers without knowing. This could be possible if the customer finds that he is not getting attention and lost the quality of service you used to provide them before.
Managing existing customer is simpler than finding a new one. So make sure you fulfill the needs of your current customer and take proper care of them. Think different ways to sell up additional services such as floor maintenance or window cleaning.
Control your speedy growth. As said, “Slow and steady wins the race”. Growing slowly will definitely end up with the best outcomes offering you a good reputation in the market. Furthermore, due to your quality service, you will have a large referral business.
8. Unaware of the Competition
As we mentioned before it is very important for you to know who is in your competition. Unfortunately, many new business owners start their business without giving a second thought to what they may be up against.
Here is something you need to be aware of when it comes to competition
- Who are they?
- How long they have been in the business.
- How big is their presence?
- Are they a franchise or an Independent?
- How many employees do they have?
- What is their target market and are they in direct competition with you?
- What are their weaknesses and strategies?
- How much they charge for carpet cleaning services.
- What type of services they provide and how they promote them?
Good knowledge of the competition can certainly give your cleaning business an edge. Also, a majority of startups overlook developing strategies for the companies that are not in direct competition but deliver a similar service to the same location.
9. Overlooking Customer Needs
Every business is built on the customer base. A strong customer relationship is a must for the growth of a business. But if you overlook customer needs, or do not stay in touch with them, or neglect their reviews, which can be another reason why carpet cleaning business fails.
Your customer may like your cleaning service, but they may love it by making some changes in the procedure or they have some suggestions. Overlooking to it you lose that great leads.
Are you listening to customer needs?
Are you listening to the customer’s suggestions or reviews?
Furthermore, are you trying to make the customer happy?
Do not neglect negative reviews. Listen to customers. Try to solve their issues. To run a successful carpet cleaning business, monitor the trending values and interests of your customers.
Learn More: Reviews Can Help Small-Scale Business to Grow
10. Lack of Employee Training
The best thing an employer can do in any industry is to invest in training and training programs for their supervisors and front-line employees. Training helps your staff to develop the necessary skills, knowledge, and capabilities to be successful at their job. Consistent and continuous training is extremely important and boosts productivity, performance, and longevity.
Invest in standardized training programs. Standardized training creates consistency and quality within your organization by eliminating mistakes, oversights, and excess waste.
Supervisors need to be thoroughly trained in all programs as well as their role as a leader and how to manage employees. If your supervisors are not well proficient in hiring, training, and evaluating your employees, your business is in trouble from the start.
Follow-up and review are equally important for all your staff. Go back after 30, 60, and 90 days and review the training procedures with the staff. Repetition will help them to retain what they have been trained to do.
11. Overexpansion
Overexpansion is a good thing if done at the right time. If your existing market is not giving you the proper business and prematurely you want to enter a new market, which can be a probable reason why carpet cleaning business fails.
At some point, business owners confuse with success and business expansion. It is easy to make the mistake of expanding your business into too many horizons. Overexpanding the carpet cleaning business, you can drain your funds and truly lessen overall profitability.
Do not over-expand your business until you are ready. Once you have built a stable customer base and reliable cash flow, then carry out research and analysis for the new market.
The Bottom Line
It is important to understand that a carpet cleaning business can take a year or two to get success. This determines you will need enough funds to cover all costs until your business can finally pay for these costs.
Failure is never an option for a successful business owner. With a positive mindset, confidence, strategic planning and management, you can succeed in business. Moreover, if 50% of new businesses fail, then 50% of new businesses succeed too.
These were the reasons and its solutions for why carpet cleaning business fails.
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