How to Start Your Own Janitorial Services Business

There are two ways to start your own janitorial services business – the easy way and the hard way.

It probably won’t be a surprise to you that we think buying a Stratus Building Solutions franchise is the easy way. You’re reading this on the Stratus blog, after all. But we think we have a strong case to make that if you want your own cleaning business, the best strategy by far is to become a Stratus Building Solutions franchise owner.

True, we really shouldn’t suggest that it’s easy to become a Stratus Building Solutions franchise owner. Running any business is hard work. But we do think Stratus makes it easier, far easier, to be a business owner.

Here’s why, and how you can become a Stratus Building Solutions franchise owner.

Why Stratus is worth looking at. When you run a cleaning business, you aren’t only cleaning. If you’re starting out, you may be the one doing all, most or at least some of the cleaning. But even if you’re doing all the cleaning, you’re also hopefully growing your business by constantly finding and adding new clients. Which means that eventually you’re hiring employees because you can’t clean everything on your own. Eventually, you aren’t cleaning anything because you’re running your business.

That’s the dream.

But that’s hard to achieve on your own. Often what happens, when you start a cleaning business on your own, you’re working so hard on cleaning commercial offices or residential homes that you never have time to grow your business – because during your precious down time, like after your kids have gone to bed, you’re sending out invoices to clients who haven’t paid you. You’re ordering cleaning supplies online. You’re paying bills, like insurance, or maybe you aren’t doing that, and you’re working uninsured or underinsured.

Starting a cleaning business on your own, without any support, can be a stressful life.

What Stratus does is take away the time-consuming work like invoicing and chasing down invoices and marketing your business, which can be mentally exhausting to work on when you’re physically exhausted. In fact, every Stratus Building Solutions franchise owner is guaranteed to receive clients. You can find them on your own, too, if you want, but if that’s not what you want to do, you don’t have to. Stratus will take care of that for you.

Either way, just being part of Stratus Building Solutions should make it far easier to find clients. When you’re in charge of making sure an office building is clean, a car dealership, or any commercial building, managers tend to not hire some random cleaner who isn’t well known. Business owners and managers know Stratus Building Solutions is reliable. That is another big reason to become a Stratus Building Solutions franchise owner – to become part of a reputable, trusted brand.

When you become a Stratus franchise, you’re also insured, and you work with Stratus Green Clean products.

That’s another huge selling point and why we hope you’ll consider becoming a Stratus franchise business owner. The Stratus Green Clean products really has nothing to do with you making more money. It has everything to do, however, with your health. Instead of breathing in toxic cleaning chemicals day in and day out, you or your staff will be working with environmentally friendly cleaning products. It’s completely safe for you to work with, and for your clients to be around later when they come into a freshly cleaned workplace. That’s not hype or being alarmist. A fast food worker tragically died in the fall of 2019 from breathing in a strong chemical agent that was being used to clean the kitchen. There are some seriously dangerous and harsh chemicals out there, and we want nothing to do with them.

How to become a cleaning franchise owner. It’s easy. All you need to do is ask yourself a few questions.

Am I ready for this? And all that means is – are you at the point in your life where you want to be a business owner, and you feel you have the time and desire? Many of our franchise owners were in the cleaning business before, working for somebody else and thinking, “Someday I’m going to work for myself.”

If that’s your mindset, then, well, maybe today is someday. But plenty of people don’t want the responsibility of owning a business – or they want it, but not yet.

So, there’s some soul searching that any future business owner should do before taking the leap.

Do I have the funding to start my business? Any business you start – even a lemonade stand in your parent’s driveway – needs to be seeded with some startup capital. The kid with the lemonade stand may not spend a dime, but his or her parents likely bought the glasses, the table to put the lemonade on, the lemons and the pitcher and paid for the water coming out of the faucet and so on.

When you buy a franchise, it’s the same deal, on a much bigger scale -- as you know. Now, the biggest franchises often require hundreds of thousands of dollars or a fat line of credit in order to purchase one. But Stratus Building Solutions prides itself in being one of the lowest cost franchise models in North America. The total investment ranges between $3,450 to $50,350, depending on the size of the territory and other factors.

But if you’re feeling deflated by those numbers – we’ve had many business owners get started running their franchise for as low as a $1,000 down payment.

So, if you at least have that, and you have the will and desire to work for yourself, then you probably have enough startup capital.

Obviously, you’ll want to talk to somebody at Stratus, which leads us to the final question.

Do I have a phone? Because if you contact the closest regional office, which you can find by clicking here, you can talk to somebody at Stratus who can answer all of your questions about being a franchise owner – and let you know if there’s a territory open in your neck of the woods.

Again, running a cleaning enterprise isn’t easy. But we do our best to make it far easier than creating a janitorial services business from scratch and running it on your own. If you’re excited to become a business owner, we’re excited to help you make it happen.