Explore Our Cleaning Invoice Example for Planning Your Business Projects

Cleaning invoice example for Planning

hey guys what's going on this is Kyle from projection up and today I'm going to be showing you how to create a business plan for a cleaning company that could be a range of cleaning companies maybe you want to do housekeeping residential cleaning or maybe commercial cleaning or window washing or that could be a number of different things this video will be applicable to you what I'm going to do is be using this free business plan template you can get it uh in the description down below I'm totally free for you to grab that and I'm going to be going through and showing you the structure of this business plan and then the main takeaway is going to be I want to show you five key points that if you can spend a little extra time on those and do them in a certain way it's going to increase the likelihood of getting approved for financing so the main perspective I'm going to be approaching this from is from a business like loan application or startup loan application and you may be wondering you know what experience do I have that you know allows me to talk about that and that is a great question so first off projection of has helped more than 50,000 small businesses create projections for their business plans their loan applications their pitch decks and for over 10 years we've been doing that and me personally before my time with projection of I was a loan officer or an SBA lender small business administration lender and so that was spent working with business owners and startups to you know review their business plans review their projections package all of their documents and help them basically through the loan application process and that included some cleaning companies as well and so I've seen some real life examples of this and helped them get through the financing portion so this video that's what we're going to be doing if at any point you like the video give it a thumbs up leave a comment on what you appreciated and you know that really helps us as a fellow small business and then also you know you can subscribe to the channel not all of our content is for cleaning businesses but lots of tips and tricks for you know managing a business doing Financial you know projections managing you know all the things you're trying to do and yeah so without further Ado we will go ahead and jump in and get started so why do you have to have a business plan maybe sounds cliche maybe it's obvious the purpose of your business plan is not to educate the reader or the Lend on what the industry does or even really what the business does for that matter if it was a Brand New Concept no one had ever heard of before then sure you know the business plan needs to do that but in this case cleaning is not a Brand New Concept which is good for you right that you can you can expect them to have some knowledge already and so what we want to do is the purpose of our business plan should be to outline what our objectives are like what our goals are and then what is our specific plan to accomplish those goals and be successful and the better job we can do at convincing the lender or the reader that we will have a higher degree of likelihood to be successful to reach those goals the more likely are we are to get approved for the financing we want if they're skeptical that you're going to be able to do that you're not going to get approved for your financing so especially if we're going for startup funding we're already having an uphill battle right that's it's already more difficult to receive financing as a startup businesses business so we really need to make sure we've kind of got our whole package buttoned up and I will I would do my best to help guide you through that here so let's go ahead and kind of get started through here first off I want you to just see the structure and the flow of the business plan here kind of the plan we're going to go through and then I want to call out the fact that this is only an 18-page business plan now this is filled out a little bit more generalized for an example business so you know if I went through and readed this whole thing it might be a little longer than that but probably not much it's a common misconception that people think they need a long business plan in order for it to be respected you know or impressed by it and that's just not true when I was a loan officer if I received a business plan that was like 50 pages long I would just you know you would roll your eyes you would buckle down and you would skim through that thing as fast as you could and so that ends up hurting the business owner because all of the important details get scattered throughout 50 pages and so with someone skimming because they have other business plans and loan applications to review too some of those important details are going to get missed which could result in you not getting approved because something was missed or maybe it just slows down the process right because they have to ask more questions and all of that so that sweet spot I think is the 15 pages 20 Pages 25 Pages because you can jam-pack your business plan with the important details every page is important versus lots of fluff the other thing I'll point out is that the financial projections are like half of the business plan they are by far the most important part of your business plan and that's just not I'm not just biased because of projection hub but when I was a lender too that's where we spent the majority of our time you know we might read through the business plan once but we would look at those projections time and time again to to help make that decision as well as your personal financial statement but we're not going to go into that today so wanted to kind of call that out so getting into this now first you have your executive summary I want you to think about this as like the cover letter or a resume or a job application this is the lender's first introduction to who you are so give the kind of overview what who the business is what you're doing your short-term and long-term goal here I do like that maybe what I would do differently is to add some measurable goals there so maybe shortterm is You' like to be profitable within 12 months you think you're going to be profitable within 12 months and maybe the long-term goal is to you know expand from one crew to two cleaning crews or I you know it could be more ambitious than that maybe you want a franchise or something like that but just make sure it's attainable and measurable and that you think it's realistic now mission statements and vision statements I'm not a huge fan on because they're typically not super realistic right like don't say your cleaning compan is going to change the world right but if there is something about your mission that is really core to the business like perhaps you're hiring and rehabilitating ex convicts or something like that you know that is a really powerful contributor to the business maybe important to its story if you don't have something like that like a secret sauce that contributes then just leave Mission vision statement out some keys to success that's good try to just make them actionable and and actually tangible the one thing you may consider adding in this section that I think can be helpful is a little snippet about the financial component so maybe what your startup costs are how much financing you're seeking when you plan to break even based on your projections that can be kind of a helpful little little teaser there moving along into the company description kind of just an extension of what we just talked about but maybe where we start to to talk a little bit more about the identity of the business so your company history this is where I would share more about like the founder story like why did the business why you know why are you doing this why did this come to be did you know if you have a partner like when did you and your partner meet and mix and decide you should make this business you know you can include a little bit of that here legal structur is kind of obvious now your unique selling proposition in your target market I think are really important so send spend some time on those you know a cleaning business again this is not to downplay it but it's not the most unique and novel business in the world now there different things you can do maybe you're a power washing company specifically or maybe you're a housekeeping service or maybe you only do commercial cleaning or you know whatever it could be a number of different things or all of those things but someone else is probably offering that same service and so you need to talk about what is going to make your business stand out in your target market you know what are you going to be doing differently than someone else does or what are you going to be doing better than someone else does and talk about that here and then here your target market obviously identify who you think the actual ideal customer is and who's going to be using your services if that's small businesses is that manufacturers is that you know affluent households like I I just make sure you outline that and who you're going to be kind of targeting okay in this section we're going to get to our first of five key points so our market analysis you can kind of see obviously what we're going to be doing here now again maybe I haven't mentioned this yet but don't think about your Market or your industry Overview at like the Shark Tank pitch where like the cleaning industry is a$2 trillion doll industry that's you know that's way too far out there that doesn't really help us we're talking about the actual addressable Market the industry overview where you plan to actually be doing business at so we're talking about you know local is what we want to be we want to be getting into here so talk about um the trends are there many cleaning services is the state of them not great do a competitor analysis specic spe especially direct competitors anyone that's doing the same that's offering the same or very similar services to you to the same customers that you would like to serve list them here and when you list them try to figure out what they do well and maybe what they don't do so well because you might uncover an opportunity for growth for your business for example maybe you live in one town and there's one pretty common or popular housekeeping service you know that comes in and cleans residential homes and a lot of people use them but they're the only game in town and maybe you go to their Google reviews and they're really terrible you maybe they have an average two star review list that's an opportunity so their strength is that they're the only game in town their weaknesses they're not taking care of their customers and so if you were to open up a competing business you might be able to secure some of those customers because they're not being taken care of well so that's important to list that here target market analysis again go in a little bit more description about like who you're trying to sell to go into as much detail as you can and Market opportunities again might be something like what I was just talking about when your competitor is not satisfying your customers that creates a market opportunity if there's a new business park that's opening up that creates an opportunity that someone you know might be able to win those businesses so there's some examples there another one might that I could mention too is there's a lot more softwares coming out like called like task rabbit and different things that people you know can Uber or they can like order a service and maybe one of those is cleaning services maybe you that's a market opportunity maybe no one in your area is really doing that and you can capture a lot of that business so key Point number one all those things I just listed you just need to do that that's a minimum requirement that's not key Point number one key Point number one is if you can provide and demonstrate some actual research to help support the fact that you actually think there's a market or room in the market for your business and so let me give you a demonstration I'll demonstrate example number three now you could pay someone to do formal market research I'm not you have to do that if you have the budget for it great but I'm going to go to this free tool it's a Google Keyword planning tool if you have a you can create a free Google ads account and then come to tools Keyword Planner and then what I'm doing here is I've set my location to Indianapolis okay that's where my Target business will operate in the city of Indianapolis and I wanted to see how often are people searching for things like house cleaner near me housekeeping near me cleaners near me and this tool is going to do a few cool things one it's going to show me related keyword ideas so this might help me see and select my like Niche right so you could see uh specific types of cleaners and how often those are being searched it's going to show you the actual search volume for those searches it's going to show you the three month change so that's more of like a seasonality indicator and then year-over-year change I think is is the big one right so this is going to help us understand is there a growing demand for our services in the area so this is going to help us address demand not so much Supply so this won't give us any indication on like are there too many cleaners already or are there not enough cleaners already but it will help us realize like oh there's at least a stable or growing number of people searching for cleaning services so let's kind of just look through this here so we've got cleaning services made Services home cleaners near me residential clearers near me so like seasonally that's not happening as much but year-over-year it's pretty stable which I actually think is a good thing because at the time of recording this you know the last couple years have been uncertain economic wise so maybe some households are cutting back on things like paying for a service like that so the fact that we're still at this point in 2023 is when I'm recording this that's flat that's a good sign because I can see as the economy grows and you know kind of recovers in that way those types of services will grow as well so I think that's good and at least indicates that it's not a shrinking or Contracting Market opportunity so doing research like that and Gra having screenshots and writing some comments on those and putting that in your business plan I promise you in addition to these other things we talked about will make it better than it would have been before to see that you're actually being a little bit more analytical about it moving along to the marketing and sales strategy and key Point number two will be at the end of this section so here's where we go into detail and the actual Services you're going to provide how you're going to you know how are you pricing those Services would be great you can even reference pricing of your competitors if you'd like to as well so you trying to go for the value offer or maybe you're going to be the high price point but the exceptional service so make sure you outline that here what's your sales strategy how are you going to find customers is that going to be advertising is that going to be cold calling you know however you want to address that it's great distribution channels and promotions advertising so again filling all that out is important it is expected it's you know required minimally to make sure your business plan is complete but key Point number two similar to what we just went through is how can we go above and beyond and demonstrate so we already demonstrated okay there actually is a market that's what we're showing through those like research fs and here we're saying okay this is these are the things we're doing to find our customers we're going to go one step further and can we demonstrate customer acquisition and traction so traction is kind of a tech terminology but it's basically can we demonstrate that we are doing like maybe pre-revenue sales or we're already getting people on a on an interest list like any indication that when we get approved for the loan in the day the business formally opens we've already got business we've already got customers ready to go versus the day we open the business is the day we start doing anything that's basically the difference we're making there so let's see if we've got a good example so I like example number three okay so maybe you begin cleaning a cleaning service as a side gig that you just do on the weekends or maybe in the evenings you start to grow a customer base of some regulars and maybe you're using a service like task rabbit to start building customers okay so maybe you've done that for 18 months and you've got 20 regular households that you clean each month and that's as many as you can do in the extra time that you have but you feel confident if you had more time or more funding you could grow that further and you wouldn't need to work your day job that's a great example when you come to a lender to say like okay I'm already earning you know $20,000 a month doing this cleaning I'd like to go full-time I think I can quadruple my output and hire another person etc etc that is an example of act you know of traction if I was if I'm the lender and I'm reading it and I say like okay so if we give you the loan and you open your doors today how long will it take to get your first customer versus oh if we give you the loan you already have 20 customers and you have a head start and you're going to start growing from there that's a big difference okay and if you can't do the side gig and you can't grow a business initially that's okay the best example of traction is pre-launch sales the second best example of traction is names on a list right so maybe you don't have the time to actually work as a side business but maybe you start talking to people and gaining some interest and you get people to sign up say like hey if I started offering a home cleaning service would you be interested and how often would you be interested and again if you go to your lender and you say I've got a 100 people that have already signed up on this list saying that they would be interested in my services if I started to provide them that's great too okay so those are EX examples of traction all right moving along to operations and management just here we going to be talking about the logistics of the business you know are you going to have a office if not if it's going to be just you maybe run it out of your home are you going to use any technology to manage the business are you going to have any people that you're hiring that's where you want to kind of talk about this again key Point number three so again that's required what really makes this section Shine for a lender is they want to see that you know what you're getting yourself into and you know what you're doing so do you personally have the experience it takes to not only be familiar with cleaning industry but also to maybe run a business acquire customers get some sales if you're lacking any of that experience how are you supplementing that is that with a partner that brings something to the table is that with an Advisory Board is that with you know a key employee someone that's going to help you know round out your skill set to give the lender confidence that you know what you're doing that's really what they want to see you know you know they they can rest easy knowing their money is you know with someone that knows what they're doing and has done this before all right moving along to the big one here Financial projections so you can see we've outlined our startup costs here we've got a few fixed assets so we're purchasing a van cleaning equipment some computers so you know what would that be $40 $50,000 give or take and then I've included of operating expenses right we want to have that cash in the bank so we at least know we can afford the first three months of expenses so you know we're talking 50 $60,000 is what our startup cost would be so maybe we're looking for a $30 $40,000 loan and then I've got a little let me just zoom in here I've got a little overview of five years of our some financial data or projections some key ratios financial ratios a breakdown of our overhead or operating expenses so the things we're going to have to pay for each month and these are you know like recurring expenses these aren't like the the cost of our cleaning supplies that would be a cost of good sold that's a different thing and then we're going to have a 5 years of our income St statement or our profit and loss projections fiveyear cash flow which you know this will help us delineate when our break even is and our balance sheet and then again Break Even point right there and our sales growth now this is the point if you stick with me this is when businesses always get overwhelmed you know they care about the business a lot of times the financial projections aren't afterthought until A lender tells them that hey we need financial projections a lot of times people don't know how to do this which is totally understandable and you'll go and pay an accountant a couple thousand dollars and it's really expensive well lucky for you uh all those projections were created using this template right here this was created by a CPA on our staff and an accountant to make it easy for you to create projections on your own your only I know it looks overwhelming all you're doing is editing these four blue tabs and only in the sections where there's blue Okay so you're just answering these simple questions the information you already know about your business you know you're going to outline some basic details about your customer how you're going to acire your customers the services you're going to be providing and the cost of those Services very simple only the blue areas again here's your operating expenses each month are you going to hire any employees those need to be listed here and if you and then it's going to automatically generate all of these charts all these financial statements that you're lenders need we are lenders that's you know why we we used to be lenders so we made these because we know that's what a lender needs when it comes to projections if you buy the template you get free Support also we'll do we'll provide a complimentary review so we'll review your projections and give you feedback help you as well if you stick around to the end of the video I'll give you a promo code the templates already cost less than $100 and I'll give you a discount on even further than that so it is a great value I promise you to get your projections created so creating projections is not key Point number four though you have to have projections it's creating realistic and within industry like Norm Financial projections and maybe you're thinking well how do I know if they're realistic I will show you so I would either go to Google or use a tool like chat GPT or an AI chatbot if you were comfortable familiar with them and I'm just asking it what are some average key financial metrics for a cleaning company a house cleaning company and it's going to give me some great data here right so gross a typical gross profit margin for cleaning business might range from 30 to 60% right let's go back to my projections gross profit 60% okay so I'm on the high end I'm probably a little optimistic but I am still within industry Norm so just might need to be prepared to support that uh net profits or net income percentage 10 to 25% let's go back 23 35 36 so I'm again a little optimistic which makes me believe that probably our operating costs are a little low 30 to 50% go back and check those 30 and then boom they drop off 17 13 11 so I would probably go back to the drawing board and see like what am I missing in my operating expenses you know it's a little optimistic but that's the exercise create your projections and then just do searches like that to make sure that you are within reasonable bounds right so your lender is not going to be an expert on every number in the cleaning industry but they will be able to look up these kind of averages to understand like if you're way out in left field or being realistic so that is key Point number four again I've linked that template down the description below I'll give you a promo code at the end of the video then coming down that's the end of the the business plan we have one more now this pertains more specifically to if you're getting a loan and that is being prepared for skin in the game that basically means you're not getting a loan for free right if you're getting a loan you're going to have to put in some money they're not going you know probably 10 or 20% of the loan amount you're going to have to personally guarantee the loan so if the business can't pay the loan back you're going to have to pay it back personally and you're also going to have to collateralize the loan ining industry isn't a super heavy asset business now your van isn't included so that's helpful but you might have to you know contribute some personal collateral or maybe have a co-signer to get approved from that and just just be realistic about and don't be surprised when they ask for personal items to secure the loan a lot of times when I was a lender someone would tell me like I don't want to be I want to separate personal and business and what we would tell them is that's great advice when it comes to bank accounts and bookkeeping but for getting a loan it's totally unrealistic you will be expected to kind of be invested personally on the hook personally so just be prepared to know what you're willing to give up and what you're not and you might have to walk away from a loan request or something if you're not comfortable with that but there you have it that's the full business plan it's linked down the description below so is the projection template let me get you that promo code it is ph20 BP we've got a full video walk through of how to create the projections free support contact us at support projection hub.com if you have any questions at all we'd be happy to help you like the video leave us a comment if you appreciated this video and we will see you in the next one [Music] [Applause] thanks