MaidBossPro Blog — Running a Cleaning Business

How to Start a House Cleaning Business the Organized Way

Most house cleaning businesses start the same way. Someone is good at cleaning, a friend asks for help, the friend tells a neighbor, and suddenly there are eight homes on the calendar and a notebook full of door codes. That is a fine way to start. The trouble comes later, when the notebook is the only place the business exists. Starting organized costs very little extra effort and saves a lot of rework once the phone starts ringing.

Start With the Big Picture

If you have not read it yet, Cleaning Business Software: The Complete Guide to Running a House Cleaning Company lays out every record a cleaning company runs on. This article is about setting those records up from the first client, before habits form.

The paperwork side of opening a business, such as registration, insurance and taxes, depends on where you live. Talk to a local professional about that part. Everything below is about how the cleaning work itself gets organized.

Decide What You Sell

New owners often say yes to everything. A clear service list makes quoting faster and helps customers understand what they are buying. A simple starting list for a residential company might look like this:

• Standard clean. Kitchen, bathrooms, dusting, floors, the work that happens every visit.
• First-time deep clean. The heavier first visit that gets a home to a level you can maintain.
• Recurring clean. Weekly, every two weeks or monthly, priced lower than a one-time clean because the home stays maintained.
• Move-in / move-out clean. An empty home, inside cabinets and appliances, usually on a deadline.
• Add-ons. Inside the oven, inside the fridge, interior windows, baseboards, inside cabinets, blinds, laundry, changing linens, dishes, walls and doors.

You can add post-construction cleans or small offices later. Starting with a short list you deliver well beats a long list you deliver unevenly.

Write Down How You Price

Pick one way to price and stick to it. Many cleaning companies price by bedrooms and bathrooms, some by square feet, and many use a base price with add-ons on top. Example prices are only examples, but a structure like “$155 for an every-two-weeks clean on a 3 bed / 2 bath home, $325 for the first-time deep clean, $35 for inside the oven” is easy to explain and easy to repeat.

The point of writing it down is consistency. Two neighbors with the same size home should get the same price, and you should be able to quote over the phone without doing math on the back of a receipt. The thinking behind those numbers is covered in Pricing a Cleaning Business for Profit: Prices That Pay for the Whole Visit.

Set Up a Real Record for Every Home

From the very first client, record more than a name and an address. Each home should have:

• Bedrooms, bathrooms and approximate square feet
• Pets, and anything the cleaner should know about them
• The extras this customer buys
• How you get in: lockbox, key, door code, alarm
• Rooms to skip and products to use or avoid
• How often the home is cleaned

In MaidBossPro these are the cleaning details and entry notes on every job, and they show under the address on the office lists and the cleaner's phone. When you book the next visit, the new job fills in from the home's last job, so you only type the lockbox code once.

Book the First Homes and Build the Rhythm

Your first customers will come from people you know, neighbors and local posts. When someone says yes, put them on a recurring schedule right away instead of “call me when you want another one.” Customers who are booked on a rhythm tend to stay booked. Customers who have to call you tend to forget.

In MaidBossPro each recurring client gets a fixed slot, the same day and time every visit. Add Recurring Cleaning puts the next 3, 6 or 12 months of visits straight onto the schedule, so you can see the coming weeks at a glance and give nearby homes the same day.

Try to cluster your homes geographically from the start. Five homes in two neighborhoods is a much better day than five homes spread across the county, and it is easier to build that way than to fix it later.

Take Payment the Same Way Every Time

Decide early how customers pay. A card on file charged when the clean is complete is the simplest arrangement for both sides, and it means you are never collecting cash at the door or chasing a check. MaidBossPro creates the invoice when the job is marked Complete and can charge the card on file, and customers can also pay online from the customer app.

Let customers know the arrangement up front, in writing, along with your policy for skipped visits and locked doors. A policy decided on day one is far easier than one invented after the first lockout.

Habits That Scale

The real reason to start organized is that you will not always be the one cleaning. The habits you build now, writing down every home's details, booking recurring work on a schedule, charging the card at completion, are the same habits your first team will need. The next article covers moving those habits out of a notebook and into software from the very beginning.

For the rest of the guides on running a cleaning company, visit the MaidBossPro cleaning business software page.