[david knowles]

I am researching a cleaning business for myself the area already has a few carpet cleaners some franchise and some well established. I would offer carpet cleaning oven cleaning and also contract cleaning (office cleaning)
My question is how many carpet cleaners can one area of say 200,000 people sustain. Is there a formula that the franchises work on when they develop a area. anyone have any idea.
thanks

[Mike Halliday]

David you posted this in the wrong section so i have moved it here, hopefully you'll get a better response

[John Kelly]

Lots of variables however I think Chem Dry operate on around 60,000 people per license.

[Richard Cole]

I live in a village of around 1000 people and there are 3 carpet cleaners, myself included) living here.  1 franchise guy and so he is restricted to his franchise territory, 1 other chap who does does it for beer money and I cover an area of around 20 mile radius of my home and there must be at least 20 - 30 carpet cleaners who cover all or some of my area.  The fact that there are other cleaners in the same area shows that is demand for the service but carpet cleaning takes along time to get of the ground, you won't make much profit for the first 2 years at least.

[daniel osmore]

An area of 200,000 people would typically have about 80,000 households, of which maybe 10% (at most) would instruct a professional carpet cleaner in any given year. If we assume an average ticket price of £100 for each job, the total value of residential carpet cleaning work in your area might be £800,000. This is a high-end estimate - more realistically it might be half this number in the current economic climate - about £400,000. On this basis your area should be able to support the equivalent of 10 full-time carpet cleaners. If you factor in commercial work as well, you could possibly add another 5 full-time carpet cleaning operators for a typical conurbation of that size.