Why Do So Many Cleaning Companies Stay Small?

In the world of professional residential cleaning, the majority of cleaning companies remain trapped under the glass ceiling of around 5 to 10 cleaners, never breaking through into the realm of truly scalable growth.  

Plenty might sputter ahead for a little while on the backs of an overextended owner and a few burnt-out star employees. However, these sorts of card-castle situations are never sustainable because they rely on personality, not systems. Growth is never sustainable in personality-based cleaning companies because it relies on everyone involved performing at their personal peak 24/7 and for all new hires to be ready-made rockstars, making hiring near impossible and personal challenges devastating to the bottom line.  

If you found your way to this page, it’s likely that you are trapped in a charisma cleaning company. You’re doing your best to operate on all cylinders all the time, keeping your fingers in all the holes in the damn, and putting out fires left and right because. The only real foundation of your business is you and the few awesome cleaners you found along the way.

You don’t know how to really teach what you do to an average new employee so that you can count on it getting done right without you. So you stay trapped, hoping for magic, ready-made rockstars to reply to your help-wanted ads and blaming their absence for your lack of growth.  

If this resonates with you and you're sick of trying to hold up your card castle business on your shoulders, take this article as your call to action to make your business stand on its own two feet finally.

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Charisma cleaning companies usually start with a talented owner, who through their pluck and determination, builds a small stable of thrilled customers. But they never set the boundaries, procedures, and documentation necessary to create scale. They’re used to being able to promise almost anything to anyone because they know they can push themselves to the limit to pull it off.

Since likes attract likes, charismatic owners usually draw in a few fellow rockstars, allowing the business to grow temporarily. But it’s a cotton candy high without substance. Eventually, everyone gets too busy. So the company has to try to operate like a normal business and hire managers, and place “help-wanted” ads for cleaners, which is where the sugar crash begins.  

Without the right structures in place, new hires are set up for failure and leave as fast as they came, aggravating loyal clients with every turn of the rotating door. Charismatic owners who lack introspection will stall out at this stage, decrying the lack of good workers these days, never recognizing their structure is to blame.

Without structure, every act and decision in the charismatic cleaning business has to be done by feeling. Cleaners scrub till it feels clean enough. They pack what feels like enough supplies. Managers assuage upset clients with what feels like a fair solution. And everyone does what feels right to them at the moment, never considering the domino effect of their decisions.

Nothing is replicable or teachable, so when a new cleaner or manager tries to share the load, their output inevitably differs, leaving clients frustrated. Unrealistic expectations set by one cleaner make the next look bad. Unreasonable promises made to the first client leave the second in a lurch, and so on, till things start unraveling everywhere. The charismatic owner decries, “This is what I get for not doing it myself,” rather than recognizing their lack of direction is causing their employees to pull in opposite directions till the business tears to shreds.

If you’re ready to face the fact that your business isn’t designed to grow and untangle the snarl of competing promises and unrealistic expectations you’ve made, you’ve found the right article series. In this article, we will explore the key foundational elements of what it takes to design a cleaning business structured for scalable growth.

Some of these elements may seem simple, while others are daunting and complex. But they’re all interdependent, like the gears in a grandfather clock, so they can’t be skipped based on preference. The goal of this article is to identify the main gears and give you a preview of what correcting them might entail, so you can select the key issues you need to prioritize. Future articles will dive deep into each of these key elements and their offshoots, so you can find the detailed support you need to take your cleaning business to the next level.

Once you know where you’re going, getting there is far easier! With your new cleaning brand standards in hand, write out, in order, how your cleaners can consistently produce that end result. No cleaner will ever read the novel you’ll inevitably write, but the exercise is critical to helping you and your trainers recognize just how many steps you were unrealistically expecting new cleaners just to get intuitively.

Once you can stare at it all, you can start to streamline it, cut out what’s nice versus necessary, risky for injury and damage claims versus easy for a newbie to master. Wrestling with this document will help you boil down your training for your brand standard.

The end result can be presentations, booklets, or videos, the key is that it lives outside your head, so it can be shared with every new hire without you having to be in the room. And no, just data dumping into your trainer’s head doesn’t count, as they, too, would like to be able to take a vacation someday without the world falling apart in their absence.

Book Recommendation: The E-Myth Revisited

If you are struggling with extracting yourself from cleaning to actually working full time as the owner of your cleaning company, The E-Myth Revisited is a must read book for you.

It'll help you understand the true pitfalls of only mastering the ability to produce the product your business sells (aka cleaning) instead of mastering the ability to run a successful business and teach others to produce the product for you. You can even buy it as an audiobook to listen to while you drive to cleaning jobs to motivate you to stop!

Cleaning supplies are usually only 2-4% of revenues for cleaning companies, but they control the outcome of the most expensive element of the business: employee labor. Being stingy on supplies, either in quality or quantity, is always a losing game if it burns out staff or decreases their performance.
Once you’re sure you have the right tools for the job, figure out, on average, how much of each item a cleaner needs to clean an average size job in your territory. Add to that a 25% buffer, and that’s the standard allotment of supplies each employee should receive per clean.  

Now comes the fun task of selecting bags, caddies, and other containers to hold these standard allotments, so supplies can be divvied out to staff accurately and consistently every time. Then comes the far less fun task of documenting the packing lists, and delegating the tasks of packing, unpacking, laundering, and maintaining these supplies.  

No one thinks of managing supplies as a key to business growth, but once you’ve gotten your first one-star review on Google for losing a client's keys or arriving to the clean with a broken vacuum, you’ll get it.

Accountants or bookkeepers might feel like an expense only meant for larger cleaning companies. Still, when you finally grow weary of constantly hiring new employees because your wages aren’t competitive or docking your own pay to ensure you can cover the insurance payment, you’ll realize well-attended books are meant for every size company.

There are plenty of resources online that will give you average expenses and expectations on what a healthy P&L should look like for a well-run cleaning company. But beyond looking at the averages, there are still some key questions you should explore yourself to customize those averages to the needs of your unique cleaning business.  

Start by doing competitive research to find out what the going rates are for other cleaning companies in your area, breaking their prices down to a per human per hour rate. Next research the going rates for cleaning employee labor in your market, again breaking down the numbers to a per human per hour rate.  

Next comes the hardest decision most businesses make, deciding if they want to be the premium, mid-tier, or bargain choice in their marketplace. This takes a lot of introspection about how good you realistically think your business services can be and what sales pitch you feel most confident making.

Are you the best deal in town type of business, the best value for the dollar type of business, or the best service in the city type of business? There’s no wrong answer, as every market needs all three.  

Once you decide though, it’ll determine your price range, which will determine how competitive your hourly wage can be, which will set your remaining marketing budget, and so on, as all the numbers flow from the industry averages married with your pricing tier preference.  

Once you know what your numbers should be, tracking them and measuring against them becomes far more cut and dry.

To succeed in professional cleaning, the goal must generate enough of a steady stream of positive reviews that the occasional Negative Nelly can no longer hold your reputation hostage.

Once your online reputation is solid enough that you won’t wince when a potential customer Google’s you after they’ve seen your ad, it’s time to get serious about paid advertising.  

Again, like with operations software, there’s been a huge expansion of companies that can help small businesses run highly effective PPC campaigns and social media pages once reserved only for the big chains. So, don’t be shy about delegating what you know you’re not an expert in.

Capturing top rankings in today's competitive online landscape is complex, ever-changing, and not for the faint of heart. So if you insist on DIYing it, be prepared to watch a lot of YouTube videos, podcasts, and more to stay on top of changing trends.

The key to effective marketing is having a consistent plan that keeps you in front of your next new customer or employee at a rate that is endearing without smothering, which, frankly, most people over or undershoot without professional guidance.

Especially on the employee side, getting comfortable with placing help wanted ads even when you’re fully staffed is a real struggle for most business owners. Still, the experts will gladly tell you it’s the only way to stay poised for growth and to keep the power of replaceability over current staff.

Whether you hire a professional service or manage your marketing yourself, just remember that people often make the decision to hire or switch cleaning companies (or switch cleaning jobs) in a fit of emotion from some negative stimuli. So if you’re not already on their mind as a company worth calling when they snap, you’ve already missed the window.  

Even if they are Googling for new companies to consider, businesses that have already built trust in their subconscious will be the links they click on, even if they don’t consciously realize it.

If your business is full of cleaners “quiet-quitting,” showing up late, doing the minimum, and leaving as quickly as they came, don’t blame the generational divide or the classic “no one likes to work hard these days” tropes. Instead, take a long hard look in the mirror at all the ways your business is or isn’t communicating the respect and appreciation passionate workers thrive on.

Have you done a competitive wage analysis lately and kept up with necessary wage increases? Pizza parties don’t pay rent, and nothing communicates a lack of respect stronger than pretending comradery compensates for salary.  

Are your cleaners set up for success with clear work orders, organized quality supplies, and properly set client expectations? Feeling like a gladiator thrown into a Colosseum full of hungry lions with a dull sword every time you enter a new home burns out everyone’s nerves eventually, no matter how brave.

Are you taking the time to train new customers on how to communicate their constructive criticism effectively? Leaving your cleaners to be belittled and berated hurts not only the worker it happens to but every coworker and no longer potential applicant they share their tale of woe with.  

Do you believe in your cleaners enough to hold everyone to the same high standards? If the workers busting their tails to be on time and do their best work are getting the same hours and wages as the ones strolling in late and phoning it in, it won’t be long before even the hardest workers give up on trying, and eventually give up on your business altogether.

Prioritizing employees can involve a lot of steps that feel counterproductive to growth, like raising prices to pay better wages, setting boundaries with unrealistic customer demands, canceling cleans rather than keeping a toxic employee on the payroll, trimming marketing spend to afford higher quality supplies, and so on. But cleaning businesses that have broken the glass ceiling know that investing in employees always pays out in the end.

Much like the sage advice of airline stewardesses, you have to put on your own oxygen mask first before you can survive long enough to help others. In professional cleaning, your cleaners and managers ARE your business, so get their mask on first to allow them to breathe deep so they can then wow your clients, rake in the 5-star reviews, drum up an avalanche of referrals, and tidy up whatever mistakes are made along the way.

Cleaners breathing the thin air of neglect and exploitation will never muster the strength to break ceilings for you, and the breaking hammer spends far more time in their hands than your own.

Where to Begin

If this article struck some uncomfortable chords, don’t despair, as identifying the wrong notes is the only way to get your business in tune.  

If this article struck too many cords at once and the cacophony has left you unsure where to start, the clearest first step is subscribing to our email list. At Microfiber Wholesale, we are committed to building out a wide breadth of information and resources for cleaning companies looking to grow, from blog articles to interviews of successful business owners and more, because when you grow, we grow with you.  

We’ve figured out that the fastest way to grow our microfiber business is to make our customers more successful and profitable, so they can afford to buy the best, and lots of it.  

Search around and come back frequently to see all the new content we’re adding as we dive deeper into all the central themes highlighted in this article, as the answers to your biggest challenge might be only a few clicks away.  

If you can’t wait, reach out to us at askanexpert@microfiberwholesale.com, so we can answer your questions directly and maybe even use your email as inspiration for our next piece.  

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