You want 12 customers, not 144
Wait, what?
You don’t want 144 customers.
You want 12 customers.
I promise I’ll have you convinced by the end of this, hear me out.
I am talking about Monthly customers vs One-time customers.
In tech, we call this subscription based vs transactional based revenue models.
But enough with the fancy talk.
A monthly customer signs up for 1 house clean per month / 12 house cleans per year.
A one-time customer signs up for 1 house clean and 1 house clean only.
Both types of customers, the monthly and one-time, both require ~2 hours of my time.
The main difference is the monthly customer has 11 cleans remaining in a year's time.
And those 11 additional cleans don’t require more than 5 minutes each of my time (usually < 1 minute).
So 12 monthly customers means 144 cleans that require ~35 hours of my time.
If I had 144 one-time customers, it would take me 288 hours of time!
35 hours vs 288 Hours!!!!!
For those interested in my math skills…
12 Monthly customers means 144 total cleans (12 x 12 = 144)
The first 12 cleans required 24 hours of time (~2 hours each)
The remaining 132 cleans require 11 hours of time (~5 minutes per clean).
That’s ~35 hours total
144 One-Time customers also means 144 total cleans but…
All 144 cleans require 2 hours each of time.
That’s 288 hours total.
I save 253 hours and make roughly the same amount of revenue with 12 monthly customers vs 144 one-time customers.
This is the power of recurring revenue models.
I talked to dozens of business owners and they all switched to focusing on recurring customers after year 1.
So I said to myself we would primarily focus only on recurring customers and skip the headache of going after one-time customers.
Every tech startup I’ve worked switched to focus on “recurring” revenue products.
Of course, there is good money to be made from the one-time customer segment.
And ironically enough, my first customer was a one-time customer moving into their new home.
So, this post doesn’t mean don’t serve one-time customers at all.
One-time customers are a great way to increase your online reviews, supplement work for your cleaners in-between monthly cleaning schedules, and learn about the industry.
Recurring customers are the “work smarter not harder” mentality.
But focusing on monthly customers over one-time customers can bring you a lot of efficiencies.
And a lot less headaches.
Let’s connect
I offer up 4x 30-minute slots every Friday to chat to small business owners who are getting started.
Day 30-180 are lonely and hard once the honeymoon phase fades away to doubt, expenses, and sleepless nights.
If you want to talk to someone who has been through it and still going through it, let’s connect!
Find time by clicking here.