Profitable Upholstery Cleaning

There are many ways to make your upholstery cleaning service more profitable: Increasing your price, adding on upholstery protector, time saving techniques, etc.
In this entry, I'd like to discuss and idea that should help you save labor and fuel costs cleaning upholstery.

The past several years has seen an incredible growth in the percentage of cleaners who use truck mounted carpet cleaning machines to clean upholstery. The advent of "dry tools" has helped make upholstery cleaning safer than ever, and the ease of set up and quickness of cleaning that tools afford has made us very comfortable in using our truck mounts in this fashion.

However, there are two inefficiencies inherent in this method that should be addressed: Labor and Fuel Costs.

If you have two people on the job cleaning carpet, one can stay busy pulling hoses, moving furniture, spotting, grooming, etc. However, when furniture is to be cleaned, one man invariably is standing around while another does most of the work. If this is the case in your company, consider using "dual wand upholstery cleaning". A truck mounted machine does not have to be a dual wand machine to be able to handle dual upholstery tools, as such tools require far less water volume and vacuum power per tool.

Simply purchase a "Y" for the vacuum hoses and a "Splitter" for the solution lines, and now you can have both employees cleaning. If there are multiple piece of upholstery, one the lighter furniture can be moved to another area to keep the operators out of each others way. If it is only one piece, such as a sofa, one operator can clean the cushions, and the other the body.

Try this method. It saves time, and since the work is done in half the time with the same gasoline or diesel powered machine, it saves fuel.

In my next blog entry, I'll discuss the use of portable equipment to clean upholstery, and how it can be done more efficiently than in the past.