Name: Affordable Housekeeping Services, LLC
Mission statement
“The mission of “Affordable Housekeeping services” is to make a dirty house into a clean home. We will bring our friendly, warm people to clean your house as quickly and efficiently as possible
Here is a rewrite of your mission statement for your consideration. I think the statement should be a single sentence that conveys to the customers the aspects of our business that are most meaningful to them.
Our mission is to have our friendly, warm and dedicated staff transform a dirty house into a clean, healthy home - quickly, efficiently and affordably.
"To provide superior housecleaning services that reflects our steadfast commitment to quality, affordability and efficiency.
Housekeeping Services" is to transform your everyday mess into a tightly and clean leaving area. We Bring in our friendly trained specialized personnel who work quickly and efficiently to get the job done.

* “Please use different word for the underlined word”
Place:
Affordable Housekeeping Services, LLC will have its main place of business at the homes and businesses of our customers where we will be cleaning. We will rent storage space for all of our supplies and equipment. Our customers will be able to request our services through our answering service, as well as online through our website or via E-mail. The manager and assistant manager of the business will carry around a business cell phone with Internet access (for monitoring online requests) and an electronic planner to schedule and keep track of all the orders.
Product or service:
Affordable Housekeeping Services offers its service to middle-upper class segment of Santa Clarita city, including areas of Valencia, Saugus, Canyon Country, Aqua Dulce, and areas surrounding Santa Clarita within 30 miles.
I would rather have someone to help me with the kids, cook dinner occasionally, and clean sometimes
The house keeper is not just like any other maid, but someone that will treat the house as if it was their own, someone that will take pride in cleaning.
One Time or on Call!
· Regularly Scheduled Cleaning (daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly)
Basic service.
· Seasonal Cleaning
· Holiday and Special Occasions Cleaning
· Move In …Move Out… or Pre-Home Sale Cleaning
Price:
What about costs for the house? Would we be charging based on the square footage of the house or by the hour?
Yeah the pricing is tricky because if we do it by square foot, and we have a house that 5 disgusting football players live in we are going to have a problem. Maybe we can do square feet, but if the house is really dirty we can add on a few dollars.
As I mentioned before I really think we should stick with just renting out storage space for our supplies, and have the business owner handle the answering service, unless we hire and designate somebody just for that job, but I think that is a waste of money to hire someone just for that. The business owner can just get a second line at their home specifically for the business and I think it would save us a lot of money in the long run.

Strategic objectives and Goals:
Adding nanny services might be a future expansion of the business.
If the business going to grow and then rent a small office.
We should sell some cleaning supplies Over time, we could expand into providing other support services to homeowners - such as pool cleaning, and maybe even landscape services. There are certainly advantages to a customer to contract with one service provider who can tend to a number of their needs. However, there are costs associated with providing these other services (equipment, chemicals, truck to haul equipment, etc) - and maybe some licensing requirements, so we would have to research them carefully. We may be able to sub-contract out some of these services. This is, of course, risky and requires are careful investigation of any business we seek to partner with in this manner.

Management team:

I would have to agree with having a specialization but I do think that all of our employees need to be trained in all areas if that is what we are planning on doing. Maybe switching once a month rotating the different areas that way they have enough time to get familiar with each place just incase someone is out on vacation or what ever it may be.
If we do rotating, then I do not think that specialization is a good choice for defining our employee base. That was going to be a marketing point - we provide our customers with employees who have specialized training and experience.
Certainly, we need more than one person skilled in "kitchens", for example, so that we are covered for vacations and illnesses.
Many companies put new employees "on probation" at first - meaning, the employee must demonstrate through job performance that they will be successful in performing their tasks. There is usually a probationary time period (for example, three months) during which time the employer can terminate the employee. That policy needs to be in writing, and it needs to be acknowledged on whatever forms the employee signs accepting employment.

Competitions and challenges
1. The competitors: We need to state who our competitors are?
2. Income: not many customers who need the help are rich
3. Finding enough employees who are competence and trust worthy
If you think of others please list them. The more threats we think of and know them, the better to neutralize these threats. • We can neutralize the threat of the competitors by charging less or be more creative in our offers. • To neutralize the income, we need to charge low enough that the women of Middle Class America can afford to hire us. Since the middle class are the most of the population then this would be our target. • Finding an employee who is a trust worthy and competence is crucial to our business reputation. Good portion of our business growth will depend on word of mouth. So having a good reputation is very important. We need to screen our employee very carefully and have a questionnaire that they have to answer which will help in figuring out who they are and what principles they have and fellow. To find enough then we need to constantly look. We should set a number in mind that these employees will have time off just like any other employees. At the same time have enough employee to get the job done in one hour. • Getting the job done in one hour means we will have more than one house a day. This will help in lowering what we will charge the customers. • I don’t think we should limit our area in the city. We should be able to go where any customer wants us to do. We can’t be choosy since we are a starting business and we need enough customers to cover our salary and our employees. • We should offer to do more things for customers who need them with an extra charge. Such as: doing laundry and folding them, ironing, window cleaning, cleaning curtains etc…

Package:

Uniforms - we need someone among us who has good taste to suggest our logo and clothing design. Having a standardized uniform provides confidence to the customer (they see our company name on the shirt), and a since of stability. It also does have advertising value.
Something comfortable for our maids so they can move around easily and comfortably but we need it to look nice as well. Some kind of pants that look nice but aren’t uncomfortable. Like a black work out pants look good and they are easy to move in. The shirts should always look nice, not dirty.
Yeah the pricing is tricky because if we do it by square foot, and we have a house that 5 disgusting football players live in we are going to have a problem. Maybe we can do square feet, but if the house is really dirty we can add on a few dollars.

I definitely think the extra training would be the difference between a successful or unsuccessful business. Checking each others work is a great idea, we just really would have to enforce that our employees do that.

Distribution

How do we get our team to the customers? Do we purchase a used (but dependable van) for this purpose, or expect the employees to drive their own vehicles? Certainly, having a van with the name of the company on its side provides a means of advertisement). That is an overhead cost for the company - its purchase, insurance, repairs, gas, etc. I just think that we will appear to be more stable company if the team shows up in a prominently marked van with the company name (and contact numbers!).

Promotion:

I was thinking of making a brochure for our business. That we can use to give the customers to let them know about what we offer.

How about creating a video clip of the team in action? We would use one of our homes (or get the permission of a customer to film theirs), showing our team arriving, then each member heading to their assigned area and doing their tasks, followed buy the team leader doing a quality check, and finally the team leaving. It would not be a difficult clip to make, and it would be available on our website for our prospective customers to view. Seeing our company in action would have more impact than simply reading a brochure about what we do and how we do it.

A few additional thoughts: • Consider offering housecleaning service gift cards for purchase by individuals want to give a holiday or other occasion gift to family or friends. It would have to be a dollar amount to be applied toward the service vs. a gift of , say, one house cleaning (we have no way of knowing in advance the size of the home of the recipient of the gift). • Some cities (like Burbank) send a "welcome package" to new residents that contain all sorts of discount offers by businesses. Find out which cities in our geographic area have such a practice, and get included in that mailing. • Look into being a sponsor of local sports team (baseball/football/etc) to get advertising exposure. • Considering networking with other service providers in the area (such as plumbing or electrical service technicians, painters, etc). Remember that these individuals are in the homes of our potential customers. They may have the opportunity to suggest a cleaning service (having seen firsthand the condition of the residence!). Likewise, if one of our staff finds a leaky faucet or other problem that needs attention, then we would be in a position of pointing the customer to one of our networking companies. As Dr. Lawson suggested, we need to think outside of the box if we are going to capture market share in this competitive business. • Check with individuals responsible for fundraising for the public schools. For instance, Burbank schools sell a card each year for $10 that has many discount offers for food, car wash, and other services. I never recall seeing a housecleaning company listed! The cards are numbered so that once we provided the service; we would note the card number (to avoid repeated discounts to the same customer - unless that is something we really intended to happen). • As for payment methods, add PayPal (that has grown significantly thanks to e-Bay). When talking about the competitors and coming up with a creative way to possibly make it easier for customers to pay, what about considering some kind of payment plan? Like depending on the size of the house, we can charge by sq. footage, or depending on the condition of the house we can add an hourly charge somehow? I think constructing a payment plan to possibly help those who aren't able to pay upfront would help. Like setting up where they pay a certain amount once a month for a certain amount of cleaning, like a package deal? Something along those lines.