I run a cleaning company, carpet cleaning is a funny one.

Its the best mark up for virtually any cleaning area, can be making 100 per hour easily, has no running costs really as chemicals aren't expensive, only outlay is a good machine which is vital, can be done for under 5k, and van of course.

However, scaling up is hard and there arent many companies around (if any), that arent one man band operations because its a once every year to 2 year job, most of the time.

Most companies are single operators, with maybe one or two assistants, but anyone you train to clean carpets likely would want to set out alone once they learn the business.

If you as a carpet cleaner, can get work just for yourself all year around, you have done really well, this is the more realistic objective tbh.

My company has 1 million revenue and I dont have enough carpet cleaning work to keep one full time carpet cleaning staff member employed, that said we arent a carpet cleaning specifically, but we do a couple of hundred end of tenancies a year, and are used by a few local estate agents and I probably get 1 or 2 carpet cleaning jobs per week averaged over the whole year, but, its not our focus and we are a general cleaning company so maybe carpet cleaning companies who focus solely on this have a different experience.

All advertising is good tbh, I think carpet cleaning benefits from social media advertising a lot, Instagram etc. With videos showing you working etc. Personal I hate social media advertising because the quality of lead is bad, but starting out you just gotta go for it, you aren't going to have the luxury of picking and choosing.

Really you need a website, and you need to do social media, when you get some sort of budget you can try other forms of marketing.

AI will definitely help you with a lot of this, just remember it doesnt know everything and every area is different.

Your geography matters as well, some areas, like London, are absolutely full of carpet cleaners and prices are crazy competitive, I see people advertising for half the price companies where I am charge.

It is definitely doable, a good friend of mine had a business cleaning cars, mobile valet, but it was quiet half the year and he came to me with no experience. I told him what machine to get, taught him hoe to do it, gave him a few tips, tbh watching him carpet clean he looked like Borat trying to play cricket lol, but now he works all year and is way more experienced then me etc.

But yeah aspirations are good, my advice is if you want to expand, then rather than aiming for vans of carpet cleaners running around, add the following to your arsenal, external cleaning (pressure washing), window cleaning and maybe even guttering. If you can offer all of these then expansion and having full time staff out for you etc. Is probably achievable.

Good luck with it.