If Katie Started a Cleaning Business

Hello and good evening. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. I want to preface this live with yes, I know I'm gonna get made fun of so hard by the people who know me even a little bit. If you know me at all, you know that cleaning is not my forte. Cleaning is not my forte. What inspired. Inspired this live is that entrepreneurship is on the rise because of the economic fallout of the last couple years. Okay? And so I want to talk about the what if? If I were to start a cleaning business, how would I do it in a way that made it super successful, super easy to scale, and also set me apart from the other people in the industry? Okay. Because it's a luxury. It's a luxury item. We should treat it as such. It is not just a. Everyone has a cleaner anymore. I wish everyone had a cleaner. It would just make everyone's life so much easier. Anyway, so I want to talk about it in a way that I hope if you know someone who is thinking about starting a cleaning business on the side, please share this with them. If you have a cleaning business, then please take any of the ideas I share here, okay? Because I'm obviously not going to start a cleaning business. Cleaning is not my forte. Okay? And also, as I'm describing this, as I'm describing the different ways I would approach it, I want you to think about how you could incorporate something similar into your customer experience, okay? Because that's exactly what this is. And hi, whoever's watching, welcome. I hope you're not going to laugh too hard at me for the what if game I'm playing tonight, but I want you to start thinking about what are the ways that you can surprise and delight your clients? Okay? So I'm going to be going into a couple different things here, okay? So first and foremost, the way you define the business is you are not a cleaning service. You are a service that makes life better for your clients. That is your goal. You're going to make life better. You're going to elevate their experience of life in their own homes. Okay? It is so much more than just cleaning, because here's the thing. When you have a clean home and you come home to it and everything's tidy and clean and put away, like you can just breathe deeper and your shoulders go down and you feel like you have your shit together, which makes you a more elite human being out there in the world, which we all want to be. It elevates our status. It makes us feel like we're winning this game called Life. Okay? So it is a make your life better business, not a cleaning business. All right? That is where I would start now in onboarding. So here are a few things that I'm keeping in mind in my make believe cleaning business. I'm keeping in mind how am I going to scale this if I get too many clients, which is an amazing problem to have, how am I going to hire people to ensure they're doing the job right? For each and every client that I have, I am making sure that I am covered so that the clients, there's never any bad experiences with my clients or if there are, that I'm being proactive about it. Okay? I'm also making sure that my clients are never going to want to work with someone else ever in their life. If, if, if they need to bring me in at 90 and I have a crew of people, then they're going to do it because they're that loyal to me. Okay. Because I offer such an amazing service. All right, so where I would start in the onboarding process, and this is so critical, okay? Because let's be real, you hire someone to come into your home and clean, they're seeing intimate parts of your life. Okay? It's really easy. When someone comes in, they don't do a good job or they don't do the job that you want them to do, to just say, you know what, nevermind, we're going to hire someone else, okay? Just switch it up, it's fine. You know, maybe her friend has a better cleaner. So the onboarding process has to be pristine. Okay. So I would go in with a special care checklist, okay. I would book every time I had a prospective client when we decided to work together, before I even start cleaning for them, I'd say, okay, cool, we're going to set aside an hour. We're going to go through your home, we're going to go through each and every room and I'm going to ask you a series of questions. Okay? Now the very first thing is I'm going to go through a special care checklist where we're going to make your checklist to your home for each room. And so basically we're going to go through your kitchen. Is there anything in here requiring special care? Is there anything in here that I need to know? Anything more than I might already know? And all of that goes into a database. So say someone has, is like a really serious cook and they have incredible chef's knives and they have to be cleaned in a very specific way. Like, and just so you know, if you don't know, this, chef's knives shouldn't go in the dishwasher. It actually ruins the blade. Okay. Also, non stick plant. Stick plant. I can't even say non stick pans can't go in the dishwasher. It ruins the non stick part of the pan, which is the whole point. Just FYI, if you didn't know this, I'm telling you, this is the little I know about cleaning. So you go through each and every room and you look to see, you know, what's the special care. What's super breakable? What's something that was a family heirloom and had has a lot of sentimentality attached to it. What's something that just needs some extra care? And you document everything. And the reason you're documenting everything, you're going to put it in this client's file is because, say, you onboard too many clients and you have to start sending in one of your employees to do this. They need to know. They need to know. And so you're not going to be able to remember every single thing, because, let's be real, you're going to be onboarding them off site, usually, and sending them in. And you're just going to forget because you may. You may remember it when you see it, but you're not going to remember when you send someone else in. Okay? So this helps you scale and keep the experience consistent for your client. Okay. You also get to be proactive about checking in to see if you did it well or if not, it's not going well. Okay. Hi, Luna. My dog's kind of grumbling at me. She really wants to play. So anyway, so you get to check in with them. You get to say, hey, listen, I want to make sure we're doing this correctly. We've been working together for about a month now. Can we go over the special care checklist and just let me know if there's anything that I'm doing not to your standards, okay? Because we all know that feeling. If you've ever had a house cleaner and they do something weird. Yes, Luna, I hear you. And they do something weird or like, you just don't like the way they do it, it's awkward to tell them. It's really weird to tell them. And so having someone be proactive and then they're also asking, is there anything missing from the special care checklist? Because let's be real, the first time, they're probably forgetting some stuff. Okay? So the special care checklist is one of the first and foremost things that I would be doing with my clients now as we're doing this onboarding tour. And welcome to those of you who are joining us. I'm talking about the what ifs. If I were starting my own cleaning company, which is a joke, I would never do this. But please take these ideas and implement them in your world. Now, as we're doing the onboarding tour of the house, and I'm asking about what things need special care. I'm also asking another question. I'm going to be asking, what do you first notice when you walk into this room? What is the thing that your eye goes immediately to? And if it's the carpet, then the carpet better be vacuumed within an inch of its life every single time you clean. If it's the countertops, great. They have to be pristine. If it's, oh, gosh, it's so cluttered, great. It has to be in order. It has to be tidied, okay? Because here's the thing. What looks clean and orderly to one person may not look the same to another. And different clients may want different things. Someone may not want you to touch the clutter. The clutter is kind of how they live their lives, and they actually kind of like it that way. But they do want really clean surfaces, okay? So you have to Windex and scrub down everything. You want to ask them what they first notice, you want to ask them what they notice second and what they notice third. You also want to ask them, what are the pet peeves in each area of this room? And this, this. Oh, sorry, I'm reading my notes here, and I couldn't read it for a second. So you want to ask them, like, what's your pet peeve in this room? You know, or what's a pet peeve that you have in bathrooms in general? Okay. And so this will open the door for them to think, oh, yeah, what is my pet peeve? Because if you can solve it for them, if you can say, okay, cool, you have a pet peeve that there's no place to put, like, all the pillows on their couch. Great. You may come up with some suggestions. Hell, you may actually find a place in the room that makes sense for them to do that. Okay? This is a way for you to surprise and delight your. Your clients. You can't surprise and delight them unless you know it bothers them. Okay? So you're able to just get all this information right in the beginning. Next, you get to ask the question, you know, what amenities or special Touches do you enjoy in a space? And this could be, you know, remember back to your honeymoon. Remember that, that luxury hotel that you stayed at? Remember the beautiful restaurants that you, you know, like your rich friends and you go to their house. What's the thing that just delights you about that? And it could be, you know, I love that they have sparkling water. I love that they just have sparkling water like over the fridge. And if you want sparkling water, you can just grab one. You know, it could be at a hotels. You know how like the housekeeping will actually like fold the toilet paper so it's like a, an arrow. It's a pretty design. Like some people just really love that. Back to the pet peeves. You know, my personal pet peeve is when you have liquid soap and moisturizer right next to each other next to a sink. Because with like without a miss, every single time I wash my hands and I accidentally put moisturizer on my hands and we all know that feeling, it's like, ah, this is what I wanted. And then you feel like you're just wasting moisturizer and then you have to wash off the moisturizer on top of washing off whatever's on your hands. So. But these are just doorways in to be able to surprise and delight your clients. You know, maybe they wish they had moisturizer, you know, at every sink. You know, it costs maybe 5 bucks a bottle at Trader Joe's. You know, you could go and you could do that and you could surprise them one week. And by the way, this is built into your costs. You're charging more because you're going above and beyond for your clients, okay? But it's incorporated into your costs, okay? You're not just spending out of your own pocket for no reason. And so you're asking them this question in every single room. The other thing that you want to be asking in this, in this make believe scenario that you're starting a cleaning business is are there any areas of the house that do not work for you? Okay? Now if someone were to ask me this, I say, okay, well, I have a spin drift problem. Okay? You guys see me drinking spin drift? I'm not even like an influencer for them. I just love them and I will promote them till the day I die. But I like, I order them in bulk and I don't really, I haven't figured out a place to put them in my apartment yet. Okay? So if someone, if my house cleaner were to say, oh, well, let me, let me do some thinking, let me let Me come up with a solution here. Even if she were to send me an Amazon link of something that looked like it may help, that would be such a beautiful surprise and delight moment. So, but I want you to think about this even, even more than that. So say someone's like, oh, my God. Well, my closet is just so, so crazy. I have so many clothes, I need to get rid of them. You know, this is an upsell opportunity. If you're a house cleaner, you can very easily help them organize their closet and declutter. You know, you could say, okay, great. One of the things that we offer, you know, once a season to our clients and, and you can sign up for this and it's X amount of dollars, is we'll actually come in and we'll help you declutter your closet for you and we'll take everything away. You don't even have to worry about taking it to Goodwill. Okay, we handle that and we'll actually bring a receipt to you afterwards if there was anything valuable in there. Same thing for their garage, the same thing for their kids rooms. Same things for, you know, everything. So it's an upsell opportunity. Okay. Now also, if there's an area of their house where they need something that, you know, maybe they need something custom built. You're, you're a cleaner. You're probably not a carpenter, but I'm sure you know carpenters and you could refer a trusted carpenter to come in to, to do this job for them. The fact that you're referring makes you more valuable to your client. It also feeds into that referral energy with that carpenter. That carpenter is probably doing work for other houses and other families. And he may say, hey, guys, do you know, do you need an amazing house cleaner? Because I know someone, she's, she's fabulous. You know, we should break, you know, if you're looking for someone, you know, let me know because I'm happy to introduce you. And it just adds to that surprise and delight. So you guys have been quiet in the comments tonight. I don't know if you're just like writing down my ideas. I hope you are. I hope someone, I hope someone out there takes this and, and runs with it. Now, a couple other ideas of amenities that you could do that would just be so delightful for a client is, you know, you could ask them, you know, have you ever had like, have you ever been in a spa where they have like cucumber water or maybe like water with oranges? You could ask them if they like stuff like that. And then Every time you show up, maybe you buy a picture especially for them. And every time you show up, you just, and then you leave like a little note and it's like, here's a refreshing, a refreshing, you know, pitcher of flavored water, you know, or fruit filled water that you can enjoy in your beautiful new clean house, you know, Happy Tuesday. I hope you had a great time at work today. Little things like that that really don't they, you know, you have to buy the pitcher, it's maybe 20 bucks and then you have to buy the fruit every week and maybe you mix it up throughout the seasons. You might want to ask if they have any allergies, but what a beautiful little thing that you could do for them. Anyway, I'm obviously not going to do this. I not a clean, I'm not a clean person. Well, I am, that sounds bad. I'm not a person who enjoys cleaning or has any talent for, for it. But I, I hope someone out there who is wanting to start a business, who's wanting to make some more money on the side is listening to this and getting some ideas from it. I also hope that those of you who do different things and are watching are listening and thinking, wow, I could do something similar in my business. Maybe not for cleaning to surprise and delight my, my clients and create that loyalty and build in ability to scale. Because the, I mean that's, that's the hardest part about building a business is usually you build it and you get it to a certain point and then things start breaking because you're too busy and you're too busy and you haven't set yourself up to scale at that point. You know, if, if you're planning on building an empire, you have to actually start at the very beginning, you know, setting yourself up for success. Anyway, I hope that was useful for you all. Thank you for joining. I have to go have dinner. It's. I know it's 9:30, it's late. Anyway, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. Thank you for joining me this evening and I will talk to you all soon. Bye.