How to Find New Cleaning Customers. Part 4 of 5

Episode 14.

Ray

Okay, Joel, we’re continuing on finding new customers and networking. We talked about leads, groups and mixers. What other avenues do you see?

 

Joel

For the other avenues. I take a blended approach with this blended approach. The next two more successful types of things in these leads, groups and mixers would be a Chamber of Commerce. Chamber of Commerce are great because they are very community activated. They want the local small businesses to come in. They want the locally owned businesses to come in. They have ribbon cuttings. They might have a First Friday event. The beautiful thing about ribbon cuttings, if that’s a prospect for you and they send out an email blast at such and such a company is having a ribbon cutting, you attend it and you get to know the people in their business. You also, as a cleaning contractor, get a free peruse of their space to kind of look around and see what some of the challenges may be of the job, and then you start finding out because all the employees are there, you find out the person that you really need to talk to. So Chamber of Commerce events could be huge. Now they tend to have it’s open exclusivity.

So in the sense that anybody who is a cleaning contractor can join a financial planner or an accountant, whatever. So there’s other people doing the same thing as you are. So if you have other business categories like your own, you might have to do a little extra work and become more involved with the chamber. Join some of their committees so that you’re more visible so that you are the one that people are thinking about when they’re looking for your trade.

 

Ray

So I mean, nothing wrong with dipping your toe in the pool. Your business is new. Most chamber of commerce will allow someone who is not a member attend events. So it’s a good way to to meet some of the players. But eventually they’re going to want you to become invested. You got to put some skin in the game.

 

Joel

Put some skin in the game. Exactly. You’re going to have to join. It’s going to be some out of pocket money, but it’s a lot less than some other types of groups because it’s not an exclusive group. So the entry cost is low. Plus, it also has to do with how active is that group in the community. Another type of group is more trade specific. And the two industries, I mean, actually the trades groups I’m going to talk about in the cleaning industry, since this is a cleaning podcast, is the Issa, which is the International Sanitary Supply Association, and Basket, which is the Building Service Contractors Association International. Now, these types of groups are completely inclusive of the entire industry. So it might be the manufacturers, it might be the distributors, the building service contractors, in-house operation and all facets of contracting from the independent contractor to the carpet cleaners disaster restoration. And what they do is they they’re involved more. They’re focuses on training, on development of management as well as training programs within an organization, government intervention and even compliance.

Okay, these groups were very active during the recent pandemic that we had, and in getting some government intervention and trying to bring additional awareness to the necessity of proper sanitation and disinfection of facilities, using the right types of equipment, the right training, the right chemistry, and trying to educate not just the industry, but the outward, the end users of who were using the products. So these types of things, yes, you’re working with your fellow, maybe your competitor in your market, but it gives you a sounding board. If you develop a relationship with somebody in another state, another city that you can use as a sounding board when they are getting to a challenge that, hey, I haven’t been there yet, who do I need to talk to? How do I get around this? Yeah, that makes sense.

 

Ray

You know, one of the things that I’d like to drop in for our listener here, we’re going to have a link to another podcast about locating customers through training, actually the differentiator for each company. DOC’S is a huge resource for training, Joel. I mean, how many years in the business?

 

Joel

40 plus years in the. Business.

 

Joel

I was eight years a master trainer for the ISSA, so I do have a little bit of experience, right?

 

Ray

So we’re going to have another podcast specifically around why you in one of the differentiators, one of those being training. So keep an eye out for that in the in the links below.

 

Joel

Looking forward to it.