Thread by @homeservicehack

🧽 My wife, @bec_berggren, and I started a home cleaning biz out of our garage with $1,000. 18mo later, we’re doing $30k/mo with 8 employees, an office, and a waiting list that’s always full.

Here are some things we’ve learned:

(I’ll update this thread over time)

Background: we’re high school sweethearts from Illinois farm country. I’m a systems/tech nerd with a background in sales. She’s a roll-up-your-sleeves hustler with a servant’s heart. I went to college for audio engineering. She went to cosmetology school.

Neither of us were getting rich in our respective trades. I wanted to start a biz for years. She was more reluctant. 😅

We’ve always had more hustle than 💰.
$1,000 was A LOT to pull out of our savings account. 😰

Today it looks like the best investment we’ll ever make. 📈

Lesson #1: WORKING WITH YOUR SPOUSE ABSOLUTELY SUCKS AT TIMES. Other times, it’s the most rewarding journey you could ever imagine. Definitely NOT for everybody. 😬

Lesson #2: COPY WHAT WORKS FOR OTHERS. We lived in Austin for 2yrs. Becca took a job with @thepurplefig, an eco-friendly cleaning co. She loved it and was a natural. When we moved back to IL and decided to try our own cleaning co, we used the same blueprint.

If you/your kid are debating college vs starting a business, consider this: move out of state, take a job at a good service biz, spend a couple years learning the ropes, then move back home and use the same formula yourself. Stay away from their service area and everybody’s cool.

Lesson #3: START SLOW AND DO THINGS RIGHT. In the beginning, it was Becca and 1 vacuum. She worked part-time at #traderjoes and cleaned on weekends + before/after shifts. She’s still my hero for slogging through that tough side-hustle phase. 🏃‍♀️🥵 💪

She did 8 cleans from May-July '20. It wasn’t much, but those 8 clients LOVED what she did. Those original reviews are still featured on our website.

18mo later, we’re doing 8+ cleans a day. 🤯

Lesson #4: KNOW YOUR TARGET CUSTOMER. We knew from the jump who we wanted to clean for: high-income suburban moms. We branded our co and designed our service for that exact person. 5/8 of those first cleans were “dream customers”. 4/5 are still on recurring service with us.

Our website: clovecleaning.com

Built by yours truly w/@carrd

Lesson #5: KNOW YOUR WORTH. Most people launch w/low prices and work them up over time. If you launch in side-hustle mode like us, your startup is fighting for your time. You have to make it WELL worth your time. Becca’s hourly rate was $65/hr when we started. 👀 🤑

We knew if we could find a few customers willing to pay those kind of prices, there was a market for us to build a real business. And we knew when it came time to hire employees, we could use those high margins to afford better talent.

Lesson #6: HIRING, TRAINING, + RETAINING IS EVERYTHING. Finding good clients isn’t “easy”, but it’s a helluva lot easier than finding good employees. Service biz’s that win are the ones who build great teams.

We decided to go the employee route instead of contractors. We wanted to build a brand, have a close-knit team, and deliver a very specific customer experience. We wanted control over every part of the process.

We decided to NOT require cleaning experience. Most "experienced” cleaners aren’t good. They’re come with strong opinions and bad habits built-in. We’d rather start with a blank slate and teach skills. Cleaning isn’t complicated, but it takes time + effort to do it right.

We spent weeks writing a job description, application, and building a training manual (@coda_hq) and quiz system (@airtable).

We spent hours extracting cleaning knowledge out of Becca’s head 🧠 and putting it on (digital) paper. 📖 It wasn’t fun, but it’s paid huge dividends.

Our hiring page: clovecleaning.com/#jobs. Even Indeed applicants have to fill out our web app to be considered. It filters out weak applicants immediately (many don’t even do it). We phone screen ~1/15 applicants and in-person interview ~1/30 if they pass.

We currently have 8 full-time employees. We’ve hired a total of 17 people over 18mo. Some don’t last, some don’t work out. Turnover is inevitable in the service industry, but we try our best to find great people who will stick. Our “sticky sensor” keeps getting stronger.

Lesson #7: HIRING IS SALES. You just happen to be selling a job instead of a product/service. You need to know your target employee, just like your target customer. We wanted smart, hardworking, trustworthy people that would require minimal management.

Good hires have options. You need a compelling offer. Our starting pay is $18/hr (good for our area). Cleaning houses all day is hard. You might convince somebody to try it for $12/hr, but they’re going to be looking for another job after a couple weeks.

We aren’t competing with other cleaning co’s for talent. We’re competing with Uber, Doordash, and every other entry-level office/retail/hospitality job. If they can find comparable pay at a desk, they’re going to take that over scrubbing toilets.

We tell people we want to be the best bosses they’ve ever had. We give a free massage every month. A raise every 3 months. No nights or weekends. Paid holidays and health insurance (as soon as we could afford it). We treat our team like competent adults and try to make work fun.

Lesson #8: QUALIFY LEADS LIKE YOUR BIZ DEPENDS ON IT BECAUSE IT DOES. Once you start running ads, ranking on Google, and getting word-of-mouth, everybody and their brother wants a quote. Problem is, 95% of those are NOT our dream customer. We want to weed those people out ASAP.

We added “friction” pages to our website before our quote request form. Every lead has to scroll through a bunch of “why we’re special” and “why we’re expensive” info. We actually try to INCREASE bounce rate on those pages.

We don’t do in-person estimates. We give a rough (high) estimate ahead of time, and clients either decide they’re comfortable with the price and want to move forward, or they bail. This makes us more efficient AND helps us qualify who’s really serious about working with us.

Our lead conversion rate is not great, but it’s by design. We care so little that we don’t measure it, but I’d guess it’s ~20%. Our schedule is already full. If 80% of leads decided to book, our waiting list would stretch out 6 months!

People love our website and reviews and want a quote. Few are willing to pay a premium for that quality. What used to feel scary (sending a quote and hearing crickets), now just feels like a normal day. Some days we send out 15+ quotes. If 3 book an initial clean, that’s great.

Lesson #9: RECURRING BUSINESS IS YOUR BUSINESS. We don’t want one-time jobs. We want sticky, recurring customers and their recurring revenue. That’s how we build a business that can truly change our lives. We want a cashflow machine. 📈

Our marketing/copywriting is designed to attract customers who are looking for a cleaning service every couple weeks, not a move-in/out or seasonal deep clean. I see other cleaning co’s clamor for those high-ticket jobs all the time. They can have ‘em.

We’ve crushed it with FB/IG ads. We market for people who have decided someone ELSE cleans their home. Those people NEVER want to go back. They’ll put up with subpar service for YEARS. We show them how much better life could be with us. They come SPRINTING for a quote.

Lesson #10: KNOW WHICH STAIR STEP YOU’RE ON. Growth isn’t smooth up-and-to-the-right. It’s a staircase: the horizontal step is hiring mode (adding capacity but not customers), the vertical step is customer acquisition mode (adding customers now that you have the capacity).

You can try to jump multiple steps at once, but everyone will eventually suffer: you, your team, and your customers. Growing pains are real. Things will break. Don’t make things worse by biting off more than you can chew. Keep some slack in the line.

👋 Hope you enjoyed. If you’re interested in or run a recurring home service business, follow me @homeservicehack and check out Home Service Hackers, our community for owners growing their home service biz (link in bio).
DM’s always open (but not always promptly responded to)