End of Year Checklist for Cleaning Companies

It’s the most wonderful time of the year… for everyone except the real workers behind the scenes making everything magical for everybody else!

If you manage a cleaning business, you already know you’re one of the “magic makers” and you’ve been busy for weeks juggling your customers’ and cleaners’ extra holiday party cleans, schedule changes, vacation requests, and more.

It’s all too easy to spend the entire holiday season focusing on everyone’s needs but your own, which is why we’re here to help. Consider this article your reminder and permission slip to set aside some time to focus on yourself and your business, so you can start the New Year strong and ready to go!

As we know you’re time is limited and you’re smart enough to know the basics, we’ve curated a short list of the top 5 end of year tasks you might have missed:

1. 1. Clean your office
  2. Reorganize your supplies
  3. Make your employees feel seen
  4. Create a Customer Naughty or Nice List
  5. Give Yourself the Gift of Visualization

1. Clean Your Office

Just like the cobbler with holes in their shoes, cleaning business owners are notorious for caring about the beauty of everyone else’s space but their own.

Clean desk, clear mind is as important for you as it is for your customers, so tackle your desk and your computer desktop files. Stacks of unopened mail, shoeboxes of unentered receipts, disorganized files, and all the other procrastination piles will haunt you like the Ghosts of Christmas' Past if you don’t face them now.

Just imagine how good it will feel to walk into your office on that first Monday in January to a sparkling desk and no looming guilt.

2. Reorganize Your Supplies

Inventory mismanagement is a classic hot spot for slip-through profit loss in cleaning companies. Sloppy supply areas are breeding grounds for accidental run outs, expired product, and employee sticky fingers.

Grab a couple of your newer cleaners that have been begging you for extra hours and invite them to an “Exorcize Your Supplies” pizza party, where you count, clean up, and cast out worn out supplies until everything that’s left is organized, labeled, and worthy of representing your brand. Don’t let your business enter the New Year full of stained towels, unlabeled bins, and cleaning tools that look like chewed up toothbrushes. Your cleaners and your customers deserve better!

As a bonus tip, if you’ve had a profitable year, sneaking in a final order of fresh supplies can help keep some of your hard earned earnings from turning into taxes.

Why Pay Taxes, When You Could Buy Microfiber Instead?!

If you are a savvy business owner, the end of the year is the perfect time to stock up on supplies, as it turns this year’s taxable profits into expenses the government can’t touch, keeping more of your hard earned money working for you.

Unfortunately, many supplies are a poor choice for this buy ahead trick, because they require you to accurately anticipate usage or run the risk of the product expiring before it’s needed.

Microfiber is a cleaning company’s safest bet when it comes to buying ahead, as the product never expires, is always needed, turns regularly, and doesn’t require complicated calculations to guess how much or little you may need.

Just a quick glance back at your past couple months of purchases is all you need to throw together an extra order you know you're guaranteed to need and use up eventually, which is a no brainer when the alternative is handing that money over to the IRS.

3. Make Your Employees Feel Seen

Any boss can hold a holiday party full of mediocre food and awkward structured fun, but great leaders know that making their employees feel genuinely appreciated and cared for is what keeps them loyal into the New Year and beyond.

Challenge yourself to rise above just the basic gifts to personally tell each of your employees how grateful you are for all the hard work they’ve done and thank them for choosing to work for you. Write a simple note, make a quick impromptu selfie video, or even just pull them aside for a quick chat.

However you do it, just make sure it’s genuine and includes a specific compliment or story about something you remember them doing well this year… none of that generic “thanks for being a team player” nonsense. If your employees are good, they have options and if you want to keep “find a better job” off their New Year's Resolutions list, don’t let them leave for the holidays feeling unnoticed.

4. Create a Customer Naughty or Nice List

Part of valuing your employees and yourself is recognizing where your time and energy is best spent. The end of the year is a great time to reflect on your customer base, which clients you wish you could put on a copy machine, and which ones you wish you could put on a rocketship to Mars.

Write an honest list for yourself of which customers are stressing out your staff and which refill their cup. For the Nice list, take the time to call your top customers and tell them how grateful you are for their business and how their appreciative manner means so much to your staff. Most likely they’ll have wonderful things to say back, so you’ll both leave the conversation full of holiday cheer.

For the Naughty list, first challenge yourself to see if it’s your own lackluster service that has brought out their bad side and resolve to right the ships that can be repaired. For the genuinely unappreciative and unreasonable clients, make the resolution for next year that for each net new client you gain each month you’ll gently release a Naughty back into the wild.

Getting to the bottom of that list will be the biggest gift you've ever given your business, yourself, and your employees, as everyone can finally use all that emotional energy to take your business to new heights.

5. Give Yourself the Gift of Visualization

If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never figure out how to get there. While growing big and profitable is every business owner's dream, achieving that usually requires getting a tad more specific.

Pour yourself a soothing holiday beverage of your choice and gift yourself with a quiet hour to sit back, relax, and visualize where you want to be by December next year. See yourself with some of your most nagging issues resolved, surrounded by happy employees, reviewing your P&L with a smile on your face.

Ask yourself what stands out as most different in your vision versus your reality today and write it down. Notice what people, processes or products are in place in your dream company that aren’t there today and write that down too.

Here's a great book that will help you visualize where you want your company. It's called Vivid Vision.

At Microfiber Wholesale, we use the concept of a Vivid Vision to help bring ideas together and generate a clear plan for what the future looks like. Every person at every level of the company can buy in to what the company is trying to do if they have a clear vision of where the company is going.

It helps unify the team towards a common goal and allows them to be connected with the CEO's vision for the company.

Check out the book here and see if it's something you think would help you grow your business!

Finally, challenge yourself to admit what’s standing in your way and capture it on your list. Don’t let yourself get caught in the weeds of trying to solve everything you’re writing, just get it all down on paper. While it’s certainly not a real business plan, that piece of paper is now an invaluable tool to work backwards from to build your plans for the year ahead.

Even if you’ve already created a business plan for next year, an exercise like this can not only give you the visual inspiration you need to power through the challenges ahead, it can often reveal glaring holes or opportunities your original plan may have missed.

Like all checklist articles online, there may be more great suggestions here than you have time for and some ideas may not even apply to you or your business. Rather than taking an all or nothing approach, spend even just a little time in the final days of this year to prioritize your and your employees' happiness. Share gratitude with people that have earned it, and save some energy to do a little cleaning for yourself instead of just your clients. Following these tips will give you and your business to enter 2023 far more refreshed than if you simply resigned yourself to the same old same old.

Remember, magic makers get to sprinkle a little fairy dust on themselves every now and again too!

Written by

Melissa Homer
Content Contributor at
Microfiber Wholesale

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Melissa Homer is a professional cleaning expert with over 20 years experience in the commercial and residential cleaning industry. She is a highly trained cleaning professional, business consultant, and educator that specializes in cleaning product testing and research, premium surface care, cleaning safety, cleaning procedure efficiency, training documentation, and cleaning damage repair. Melissa has worked for some of the biggest names in the professional residential cleaning industry, including P&G Professional and MaidPro. She has been interviewed and quoted in numerous leading publications such as Martha Stewart Living, Real Simple, Consumer Reports, Better Homes & Gardens, U.S. News & World Report, and The Washington Post.

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