The Cleaning industry is something that cannot be replaced at this time and doesn’t have a foreseeable end of life as it’s something that every office, home, hospital and place needs to have to a certain extent. This means that ultimately, it is considered a safer bet in terms of starting a new franchise business as it’s a market that’s not going away, however that doesn’t mean that it won’t change because of market fluctuations.

Cleaning Franchises Past

Looking back to 2011, marketresearchreports.co.uk estimated the industry turnover at 4.7bn, and considering this was during the recession period this proves that even in hard times, this service is a necessity for a lot of organisations. This is fundamentally because the cleaning industry provides a necessary service at a smaller cost than having these services inhouse for larger contracts. As cleaning is its core business, it is optimised to provide that service, and that service alone, so presents hospitals or large corporate offices with a more cost-effective way by reducing inhouse head count by outsourcing this service.

The market, however, can shift in hard financial times; the small companies in this market have struggled to cope with loss of work and more competitive prices. This can be seen by the market concentration levels, with 91% of industry being serviced by 1.25% of cleaning companies.

Cleaning Franchises Present

The UK industry has been growing at a steady rate since the recession and the cleaning franchise industry isn’t different in this trend, in fact it’s better. The Industry has grown by 21% since the recession, recorded by the British Cleaning Council in 2015. This figure compared to the national figure of 17% growth, demonstrates that the cleaning industry is proving to be a great opportunity for those looking for a new franchise in a stable market. This can be verified by the increase of the number of businesses that ceased to exist in the same period; the national average was 9.4% and the cleaning industry had a much lower figure of 3%.

The industry is one of the UK’s biggest employers, with over 700,000 employees in 2015. This large workforce is separated across the different subindustries it services, such as:

• Home Cleaning
• Carpet Cleaning
• Commercial Cleaning
• Dry Cleaners
• Other Cleaning Service Providers

This separation of services gives potential franchisees a range of opportunities to ensure they choose a market that suits them. This range also improves the sustainability of the cleaning industry as, even if one of these potential customer types suddenly falls short on money, it doesn’t necessarily affect the others.

You can see that the cleaning franchise industry is striving by the amount of franchises we have on offer in this industry - Cleaning Franchise Opportunities

The Future of the Cleaning Franchise Industry

The future of any industry can never be guaranteed but you can draw upon the past and present market statistics with global market issues and trends to provide you with a realistic forecast. As you can see in the previous data, the industry is still required in hard times, and excelled quicker in the recovery years that followed. That alone ensures that this industry is something that you can succeed within if you have a good business model. It doesn’t however tell you that the industry is likely to grow or perform even better for the foreseeable years.

Pandemics are something that will likely influence the cleaning industry in the future as they are becoming a serious global issue. The UK, fortunately, hasn’t been hit with many of the most serious viruses that have occurred in recent years, remembering Ebola or the Zika Virus. That, however, doesn’t mean we will continue to be lucky and the best way to combat the spread of pandemics is cleaning. This of course doesn’t just mean cleaning the office as we understand personal hygiene is a large factor but office and hospitals are prime examples where illnesses can spread easily, due to close proximity to each other for an extended amount of time. The cleaning industry will be one, if not the most, influential industry to combat this and unfortunately this is something that’s likely to happen at some point.

Overall the cleaning industry can be hit on hard times but always has and most likely always will survive, for the foreseeable future at least so we at Start Your New Franchise would recommend this franchise industry.