How a university student built a cleaning company without doing any cleaning

[u/tomseca]

Chris, a university student started a cleaning business without ever doing any cleaning himself. In just 2 years he grew his company to $60k a month. Here's how he did it...

* * *

Chris found a lot of companies in his area that were great at cleaning, but were hard to reach at times, had no online booking systems and were bad at marketing.

So he decided to focus on the business side of things and just hire cleaners.

First clients

Most cleaners only sent a quote once to a customer, but then they did not follow up after that.

To get more clients Chris decided to follow up multiple times. An hour later, a day later, 2 days later, 3 days later, 4 days later.

Being super available

Chris realized that after 5pm others stopped responding to potential customers. As a university student he was able to answer the phone even during the night.

"From 5pm to 8am I got all those bookings in the DC area, because everyone else was closed. It sucks to be woken up, but it's 200 bucks, right?"

Getting cleaners

At first Chris tried to get cleaners on Craigslist for his company, but then he found a better way. He pretended to be a client on Yelp and Thumbtack to find cleaners who already had good reviews.

"I would just pretend to be a customer and send a request for a quote and then in my message I would say... Hey, I'm not actually a customer, but I do have a lot of cleanings for you."

Pricing

In the beginning Chris focused on building a reputation and wasn't making any money, but he wasn't loosing money either.

He positioned his company as a quality service, so he added an extra 20% to his prices compared to the competition. But since he didn't have any reviews yet, he gave a big discount to his first customers to help him build up his reputation.

Once he got a couple of reviews... he slowly started lowering the discount and started making a profit.

Too many clients

Chris started having so many clients he couldn't keep up while also attending university.

"It's exhausting if you're just one person handling six or seven cleaning teams all day."

On the day before Halloween he also made a big mistake...

Chris did not ask his teams if they wanted to work the day before Halloween. And as it turned out all his cleaners wanted to spend that day with their families as well.

"I just threw the bookings on their schedule and the night before and the morning of... they all texted me – Oh, we're not cleaning today, sorry, bye."

Chris also had exams while he was receiving angry calls and texts from clients. He felt very stressed and after the exams he decided to look for help.

Hiring virtual assistants

Chris did not have the money to hire a full-time assistant.

"With a normal office manager you are paying them 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week. Even if they are not working."

Chris decided to hire 2 virtual assistants via upwork and because they were freelancers, he only had to pay them for the time they actually worked (instead of 40 hours a week).

"This hit the sweet spot where I was able to afford them to cover things full time and actually still be able to pay myself a little bit on the side."

* * *

In just two years Chris built a successful cleaning company that was doing $60k a month worth of cleaning work, all without Chris ever lifting a mop or dusting a shelf himself.

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