Carl, do you currently work as a Data Analyst?
You'll find that although there are some common trends between different carpet cleaning businesses across the country, you will never get two identical sets of answers to those questions.
And I too am puzzled by questions 3 and 5, these should NOT be a concern for constructing a business plan! Lots of customers pay "with cash" but that is a lot different from a "cash price" which as we all know is very naughty and none of us ever do it
As Ian says above, the factor that will make or break you is two-fold:
1) how good at marketing you can become
2) how good at selling you can become, once you get an enquiry.
It's no good being brilliant at making the phone ring but not converting those calls into jobs. It's also useless being the world's best salesman if you've got nobody to sell to. The two disciplines are intrinsically linked but are completely separate skills.
machines, chemicals, vans, etc etc... all incidental, unimportant things. You just need to know a realistic budget for those. I would get a van on HP to begin with which gives you an exact monthly budgeting cost. £X.XX for signwriting
Spend about £4k in total on a decent second hand extraction machine, rotary machine (DO NOT buy these new) and all the associated tools & accessories (lots of job-lot kit for sale, you should be able to pick up most of what you need second hand)
Spend the rest on getting a logo/image/colour scheme for your company, a website and then whatever marketing to get you going. Yellow pages might be a bit hit and miss in a big city like Sheffield; there's probably umpteen other carpet cleaners in it (and Shaun has the market sewn up anyway
) so maybe take a punt on that in a year or two when you can spare £500 for a small ad (and it will be very small for than money)
Leaflets will always have some degree of success but it depends on the design, the offer, the "prospect quality" of area you deliver to and the timing to some extent. Probably depends on how many other carpet cleaners do leafleting in the area too. Also it's generally considered better to leaflet to (for example) 200 houses 5 times over at intervals of about 6 weeks, than to deliver them to 1,000 houses once only. So, scaling that up, if you want to put out 10k leaflets a month, pick two areas of 10k houses roughly and alternate between them every month.
Oh and if you're planning to do a lot of leaflet delivering yourself, the Samaritans can be called 24 hours a day on 08457 90 90 90
They're good at talking people out of suicide
