The Cleaning Industry is Exploding

 Two recent conversations have ignited my excitement about our industry. In my interview with Ricky Regalado, he shared industry growth stats that floored me. Has the number of new cleaning business owners doubled due to the pandemic? A few short months later, I met with commercial cleaning industry leader Ed Selkow for coffee. Our conversation lasted 3 hours and I took so many notes. Ed will absolutely blow your minds when I bring him on the Smart Cleaning School Podcast for a multi-part interview series. He impressed on me something else. Technology is becoming a major part of our industry. We need to learn and grow with it or we'll be left behind. I can't wait to tap into Ed's brain to discuss this topic. In today's episode, I wanted to get the ball moving on where our industry is going.  I consider myself an ambassador for the cleaning industry. I want to lift up the experts and resources and teach the newbies proper business owner mindset. I believe this is important work so that every new cleaning business owner can skip years of common pitfalls and mistakes. They can grow into the professional, business-minded leader our industry needs.  

Let's start with industry statistics. What is going on and why? Bloomberg reports that the total number of janitorial jobs in the US grew from 908k to 958k in the 2-year period of 2006 to the 2008 recession. Those jobs sharply declined to 913k by 2010 and steadily rose year-after-year to 1.1M in Feb 2020. That's a 20% increase in 10 years! But then the pandemic hit the economy and the janitorial jobs plummeted to 922k by April 2020. I remember April 2020 well. The initial fear was still present, but people were starting to look for solutions. Big hitters like Mark Cuban were predicting the growth of essential industries like cleaning. The cleaning professional organizations were lobbying in DC to acquire the "essential" designation for service providers. I dug deep into the science of cleaning and proper disinfection to create my own free course and series on the "9 Mistakes in Disinfection". Our industry got the essential designation. Residential cleaning companies slowly bounced back and commercial skyrocketed as janitorial jobs returned to the 1M mark in August 2020! That's a growth of 80,000 jobs in 5 months or 12%! Job numbers have continued to climb to the current 1.04M as of February 2022. To put this in perspective, janitorial jobs accounts for just under 1% of all current jobs in the US. The actual number is this. 6 out of every 1,000 workers are janitors or cleaners! For more perspective, there are 1.1M plumbing & HVAC jobs, 977k electricians, 7.5M construction jobs, and 843k landscaping jobs. Cleaning is a big player compared to other blue-collar trades. Here's more perspective. There are 2.9M jobs in information services, 10M in professional & technical services like engineering, 5.1M hospital workers, 2.3M real estate professionals, and 1.1M couriers & messagers like Amazon and FedEx delivery people. Cleaning is carving out a larger and larger slice of the US economy, projecting to go upwards of $88 billion by 2025 or 0.3% of the US economy. This is astounding to me! 

Read the rest of this article at the Smart Cleaning School website