[Neil Grainger]

Vernon

What about the fact the the cleaners are doing so many jobs a week. This is not right for the customer or your staff.

Staff always will be aggrieved if they are only going to make £40 while you make £60. Are they using your equipment your vans and your chemicals, no I think not they are using there own that they have already purchased from you.

This seems to me to be exploitation of CC's that are not able to find all their own work for one reason or another.

Being a good business owner is not just about making money, it is also about the quality of life for the people that work for you.

You need to look at what you would do in their postition. People only get into this sort of aggrement when they are desperate or do not have the knowledge to run there own business. 

Look at your self and then ask why they do it to you. If you want the reputation of a shark then dont change a thing but if you want to run a good business and have happy staff changes the rules. You will get so much more

[John Kelly]

In Vernons defence, who I don't know incidently, there are lots of carpet cleaners who carry out work in this way. Many of them are good cleaners but poor businessmen who start up but can't hack the marketing side and end up becoming disilussioned. Someone offering sub-contract work on this basis can be a lifeline for them to stay in business.
We do the same kind of thing although slightly different where we split 50-50 and we supply the equipment and they run the vehicles, supply their own chemicals etc. They are also free to carry out their own work. 50% of a resonably priced job is better than being one of the cleaners who advertise in the local papers charging £10 a carpet £20 for a suite. We are providing work which they would/could not obtain off their own back and for which we pay the advertising/marketing costs.
It works for us and them.

[Ian Gourlay]

I do not think there is anything wrong with paying a % of a reasonable amount.

What Im not happy with is when a Customer thinks they are going to get a service for a low  cost and responds to the advert and a booking is made and The Carpet Cleaner has to upgrade  the customer to make it worth his while doing the job.

All the Marketing  and Sales should be done advance

I do realise you can attract more people by advertising a Suite Clean for £45
What amazes me about half price leaflets is the price has stayed the same for the 12 years I have been watching them

As John says not everybody knows how to or can afford to Market in the way required to get a contiuing flow of business.. And getting leaflets out and Newspapers adverts can be expensive.

John I do not know which style of Marketing you use so please do not think I am putting you in the bait and switch categeory.

As this Forum is designed to help Carpet Cleaners and we appear to have two top Marketing people on this thread, John and Vernon may I ask what % of the end job total sale would ou expect to spend on Marketing  to get that customer

What I also do not like is where a company takes on lots of people under these terms but does not make sure they get an even supply of work throughout the year.

Vernon I took a look at your Web site last night, The body of the Rhino looks similiar to the Dimondback.

[John Kelly]

Ian

Just to say that we have never and will never adopt bait & switch methods. Carpet cleaning is only part of our business and a continuing activity from when I originally started in 1994.
As regards marketing costs you need to be spending at least 10% of turnover to just stand still and 25% to grow your business. As usual the usual marketing mix is essential and even more important is to monitor what is working. If you don't monitor it you will not know whether you are wasting your money.
To reiterate mainly to new starters, keep away from advertising on menus, estate agents brochures, schools publications etc they very rarely work.
Yellow Pages, Yell.com, Thompsons in some areas, good leaflets an a regular basis, its no good doing a one off, people need to see your name time and time again and most importantly keeping in touch with the customer you already have. You are not that important to them and they easily forget you, remind them who you are, 80% of people don't know who last cleaned their carpets.

[Vernon Purcell]

We spend well over £150,000 per year on advertising, now to date we have cleaned over 9.8 million carperts. This makes us one of the largest independant carpet cleaning company in the UK if not the largest. All these carpets have been cleaned with machine we have built and chemicals that have been produced , all of our product work or we would not get our Tecs to use them, we would use Prochem or Chemspec.

[cleaning co]

 9.8 mill    really ? who old is your firm 200 years lol   u ever traded under the name of homefresh by anychance?

[Vernon Purcell]

No we have been trading for 17 years under the same name

[Ian Gourlay]

Vernon . Thank you for that information.

It just shows theamount of business that is there.

I do  not  suppose you will reveal what 150 k is a a percentage of your turnover?

[Vernon Purcell]

MMMMMM
Ian
Privatly maybe

[carpetclean]

hi vernon are you sure the figures are correct as on that calculation you have been cleaning almost 1800 carpets a day!!? quite an incredible amount even for someone with your ability

[Ian Gourlay]

Vernnon,

I thought you might say that. But You obviously have been very successful  so I thought I would ask.

I do not really need the answer as Johns answer has agreed with my thinking

Regards

Ian