Leigh Farrell
Contributor
I'm 31 years old, from Adelaide, South Australia.
Like most of you, I've had a number of ''businesses'' in the past, ranging from coffee mlms to electrical safety testing franchises to social media state master franchises/franchisors. Most barely paid my bills, some didn't even cover costs.
Around 6 months ago i decided to build a business that would actually work. I decided it had to have the following criteria:
Entry cost below $5,000.
Easy to teach future employees to do the work.
Proven market for product/service.
Frequently Recurring or subscription sales.
Heavy customer dissatisfaction with existing providers (competition).
And a few others that don't come to mind at the moment.
After careful consideration, i decided to start a home and office cleaning business that uses environmentally friendly products.
Within 3 months we were turning over the $1,600 per week ($80k per year). At this time i have out customer feedback forms and received great feedback from all of my customers. That's when i started looking to hire my first employee. Eventually i found the right person, and was able to secure an agreement from the government to cover 45% of her wages for the first 6 months.
I took about a month to work with my new employee and teach her the processes and procedures I'd developed. During this time i didn't take on any new customers.
Since then we've lost a few customers due to some mistakes i made (i.e. not having a backup plan when my employee took a week off sick), and some that we couldn't help (customer moving interstate, or closing down their business). Customer satisfaction isn't as good as it was (97%), but is still around 85% and i'm working to bring that back up. We've also started getting new customers coming in again.
I'm really proud of what we've achieved so far and am really looking forward to reaching my target of $1,000,000 a year within 5 years.
I'm also really looking forward to getting to know you all and helping each other grow.
Like most of you, I've had a number of ''businesses'' in the past, ranging from coffee mlms to electrical safety testing franchises to social media state master franchises/franchisors. Most barely paid my bills, some didn't even cover costs.
Around 6 months ago i decided to build a business that would actually work. I decided it had to have the following criteria:
Entry cost below $5,000.
Easy to teach future employees to do the work.
Proven market for product/service.
Frequently Recurring or subscription sales.
Heavy customer dissatisfaction with existing providers (competition).
And a few others that don't come to mind at the moment.
After careful consideration, i decided to start a home and office cleaning business that uses environmentally friendly products.
Within 3 months we were turning over the $1,600 per week ($80k per year). At this time i have out customer feedback forms and received great feedback from all of my customers. That's when i started looking to hire my first employee. Eventually i found the right person, and was able to secure an agreement from the government to cover 45% of her wages for the first 6 months.
I took about a month to work with my new employee and teach her the processes and procedures I'd developed. During this time i didn't take on any new customers.
Since then we've lost a few customers due to some mistakes i made (i.e. not having a backup plan when my employee took a week off sick), and some that we couldn't help (customer moving interstate, or closing down their business). Customer satisfaction isn't as good as it was (97%), but is still around 85% and i'm working to bring that back up. We've also started getting new customers coming in again.
I'm really proud of what we've achieved so far and am really looking forward to reaching my target of $1,000,000 a year within 5 years.
I'm also really looking forward to getting to know you all and helping each other grow.
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