[homenclean]

One minute your flying the next dead there is no pattern to the flow of work at the moment. Really busy last week but the run upto Easter was probably the worst i have had in years.

if it wasnt for the commercial work i dont know what i would have done.

But that leads me to my second point:

Although been doing a fair bit off commercial work getting paid seems harder than ever. I have just been paid from a Job i did in September and have numerous invoices outstanding from January.

Is it just me or has any one else noticed the same things.

John

[Deep Clean Newcastle Gateshead]

Country is going into recession me thinks....

[Shaun_Ashmore]

I'm not sure if we will get recessions like we used to mainly for 2 reasons

1. the governments of the world know how to soften the pain (I know that is open to serious debate but what is their benefit of recession?)

2. money makes the world go round and people don't batten down the hatches for long not like they used to if at all they would rather go on spending and then go bankrupt.

Looking at it I think people are looking for a recession rather than there being one saying "oh it's quiet" the thing is that if you procrastinate then you won't get customers to call. Take recession off the topic and talk to your wife/lover/friends/customers about positive things and have a laugh and you will feel better your customers will (in your head) refer you more, you will convert more jobs, offer better service etc etc

PMA Positive mental attitude as Linford Christie used to say.

Shaun

[Mike Roper]

I can see both sides , being positive can make a big difference,I mean if you keep thinking recession recession then thats what it will be .On the other hand you cant ignore trends or changes in work patterns.
Over the last couple of years , since forking out £18000 on a van coincidently, the summer months have been slower than I would like. I can still hear the words of my  accountant when I asked him about spending so much on a van - ' well the phones not going to suddenly stop ringing' having been going 17yrs as it was then.Trouble is it did slow down. No worries the vans all paid for , so is everything else but if this summer follows the same pattern I'll be looking at either more selective marketing or adding a new service .
Not wanting to be negative to newbies but I m glad Im not starting up from scratch now.
Mike

[Deep Clean Newcastle Gateshead]

Positive Mental Attitude is good, dont get me wrong, but looking at business trends over the last 8 months, especially the last three and things are not good out there. Im not talking about Carpet Cleaners Im talking about business as a whole, people are starting to tighten on what they spend.
That may be a good thing though, so instead of replacing a carpet, they will get it cleaned, so there we go some PMA

[Shaun_Ashmore]

I'm up nearly £4k on last year and I've had a week off, so perhaps South Yorkshire is coming out of recession probably the 1990's one

Shaun

[Doctor Carpet (Ret'd)]

Re: PMA

As President Roosevelt once said," It's a recession when your neighbour loses his job but a depression when you lose your own job"

One of the reasons why a recession is perhaps less likely is that because the country's workforce is now more diversified. Gone are the days of huge factories employing tens of thousands of people. When one of these factories closed it wasn't just the people in the factory that lost their jobs but all the industries around that factory that serviced it or fed off it would also close down. In other words we don't have all our eggs in one basket and hence why the messages tend to be more inconsistent.

I'll take my economic anorak off now, guys.

[Deep Clean Newcastle Gateshead]

Dr Carpet, Excellent analogy! Respect!

[Shaun_Ashmore]

Spot on!

In the 80's Sheffield was on it's knees (some say it ever recovered) but 500k people and a high % were related to steel or coal, Liverpool had 25% of it's citizens unemployed at its peak I don't believe that itwould happen in te same way again unless the call centres close down

Shaun

[Deep Clean Newcastle Gateshead]

Well that may happen yet, as the call centres go to India ........
But yip it was the same in the north east with the coal and the steel works closing
Not much up hear like that now. We are just all carpet cleaners LOL

[Steve Chapman]

We recently had two companies go bust before paying us, one being a marine engineering centre set

up for the 2012 olympic sailing events, it's the first time we've lost out from big companies that have

obviously bitten off more than they could chew!

Does start to make you a bit more wary tho about commercial work!

regards
steve