A Big Welcome, My Bonafide Peeps!
- May 27
- 6 min read
First off, thank you for visiting.
Mi casa, tu casa — my website is your website. Please make yourself at home. Get comfortable, grab some snacks, a cup of coffee, a cup of tea, or maybe just a glass of water with a slice of lemon.
I understand you’re interested in starting a house cleaning business, and I want to say CONGRATZ on wanting to be your own boss. It’s a good feeling when you have control of your own time and how much you want to earn each day or each week.
That’s why I’ve set up a free course here:
Each day has lessons — and each lesson is a blog.
Many of my blogs also include a complete video version of the blog, created in a business presentation style with visual aids, on-screen text, and audio. This gives you flexible ways to learn. You can read and take notes, watch and listen, or simply listen while getting other things done.
Each blog is a lesson and a journey from me as an 18+ year house cleaner. My hope is that my experience helps your business journey so you can start on the right path.
And honestly, I hope my journey helps at least one person.
Because today, I often hear people say:
“Just start!”
Just start a business.
Just write a book and sell it.
Just start a blog.
Just start an online business.
Just start a cleaning business.
Just start this. Just start that.
And then they say, “You’ll thank me later in six months.”
But to be honest, this is how I feel:
The work — most of the work — is simple. The start is the struggle.
Everybody thinks house cleaning is easy. And honestly, the cleaning part can be. But the part nobody talks about is how hard it feels when you don’t know how to start.
It’s hard because starting without a plan can make simple steps feel confusing.
When I first started 18+ years ago, I started with a coworker. We both knew we knew how to clean. We weren’t afraid of hard work. But we also knew we didn’t really know how to truly start.
Again, the start was the struggle.
We asked two different people we both knew who had their own cleaning businesses if they could show us more or less what all they clean in a house. We even offered to clean with them for a whole day for free, just helping them out with their cleanings so we could see how they cleaned a client’s home.
They both told us, “No.”
They said they didn’t trust anyone. They didn’t want us to steal their clients.
And we told them we completely understood.
Back then, 18+ years ago, I wasn’t even thinking about YouTube or Myspace to learn anything.
Then my coworker told me that her husband had just purchased a small landscaping business, and he was focusing on building it by getting more clients. A very close friend of his told him that it was best to do door-to-door advertising for landscaping from January through March during tax time, when people may have money and are willing to pay to get their yards ready for the spring season. He also said October was a good time because the leaves were falling.
So I remember telling her:
“We can do the same.”
It was October, so we decided to do our door-to-door advertising for the holidays. We could offer holiday cleanings for clients while they were out shopping and getting ready for the season.
We made our own DIY homemade flyers, and we went door to door.
That is how we got our first clients.
At that time, we did not focus on cleaning products, how to clean, or what to clean.
We kept making flyers. We kept going door to door. We kept our focus on getting that first client.
And then we got our first client.
We did a walk-through estimate to see the type of floor, kitchen appliances, countertops, cabinets, and everything else we needed to look at. Then we gave the estimate.
While driving back home after the estimate, that’s when we started talking about the way we both cleaned our own homes. To our surprise, we realized we cleaned kind of similarly, and we were familiar with many of the same cleaning products.
My coworker had a caddy cleaning product holder and a small bucket. I had a Shark vacuum, a broom, and a flat-head mop.
We purchased some other products like Ajax, Dawn dish soap, sponges, a small brush, steel wool, Totally Awesome Cleaner, Lysol, and other basic supplies.
We both agreed that as soon as we started making some money, we would invest in better and newer equipment.
So at that moment, I thought we were totally in business.
But that wasn’t even the real start.
Because then the calls started coming in.
And when the calls start coming in, that means you have to return those calls. You have to organize the car with cleaning products and equipment. You have to keep up with receipts, gas, payments, driving from one house to the next, cleaning product expenses, hiring more help because more jobs are coming in, learning how to say “no” to more jobs, setting boundaries, and so much more.
Oh, the business grew fast.
And without knowing what was around the corner, sometimes the motivation started going down.
Seeing more work didn’t always mean more money — and we learned that too fast.
I had to develop independence and self-discipline faster than I expected.
And I figured out that if I wanted to be a boss, there were many hats I would need to wear, especially in the beginning while I was still learning how to manage my business.
This is how I started putting things into each hat:
1. Customer Service Rep
This hat included:
Calls, texts, problems, complaints, reviews, and keeping up with the calendar for our daily cleaning jobs.
2. Marketer
This hat included:
Flyers, business cards, door-to-door advertising, choosing the day and time to market door to door, and following up with word-of-mouth recommendations.
3. Bookkeeper
This hat included:
Mileage, expenses, gas, cleaning products, income, profit or loss, monthly earnings, tips, receipts, and independent contractor pay.
4. Cleaner
This hat included:
Stocking up on products, cleaning the vacuum daily so it was ready for the next workday, keeping the car clean, and washing microfiber cloths at each client’s home.
And very quickly, I learned about hat number five:
5. Time Management
This hat included learning when to hire help, how to clean a home more effectively and efficiently, how to save time, money, and energy, and why it was important not to drive more than 15 minutes away from one cleaning job to the next.
I had to develop a system for each hat — daily, weekly, and monthly.
What I would get done each day.
What I would get done each week.
What I would get done each month.
As you go through “Start Your Business in 9 Days,” you will see how I keep control of my business with simple but effective systems.
I didn’t spend $100 on fancy business systems.
I created my own simple systems:
A calendar. Receipt books. Ziploc bags. A business journal. Profit and loss records. Income records. Simple notes that helped me stay organized.
You will learn that what I’ve been doing for the past 18+ years can still help you today.
Not to make things complicated.
But to help you start.
To help you crawl before you walk.
To help you get a good picture of what it really means to have a cleaning business — whether you are trying to start from scratch or you have decided to rebrand after reading my blogs.
Because starting a house cleaning business is not just about cleaning.
It is about learning how to think like a business owner.
It is about learning how to manage your time, your money, your clients, your supplies, your schedule, and yourself.
And that is what I want to help you understand through this 9-day journey.
Happy business!
All the best on your boss journey.
You’ve got this!
Please Note: I Keep adding new lessons=blogs to my site here, so keep coming back to learn or subscribe to my Youtube channel to know when I have posted something new.
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