In March, I ⟐ documented starting my cleaning company, Stars and Scrubs:

The basic thesis of “why is Kristian doing a cleaning company” is that I’m a systems thinker. The average cleaning company is pretty unsophisticated. They’re probably in the business, literally cleaning, and have a bunch of text message conversations with their clients. So by bringing a process/workflow, we can win on operations. We can scale faster. We do that with tools.

Today, I’m beginning to shut it down. This post covers the good, the bad, and the ugly of starting a cleaning company.

The ugly

Yes, we start with the worst stuff first. Why not? We’re shutting it down, obviously it can’t be going that well!

Per my quote above, cleaning companies are unsophisticated. They’re a people-business. Bad hires ruin a cleaning company. It is really difficult to find non-shitty cleaners. Over the past three months, I hired a dozen cleaners. I did phone interviews, background checks, extended offers, and onboarded them onto our software. Most of them got stuck after the background check. They didn’t want to proceed, they dropped the ball, whatever the reason may be.

The people I did hire were flaky. I have one awesome cleaner. The rest oscillate somewhere between unreliable, or a magnet for bad luck. I’ve had 12 hours of notice that a cleaner wouldn’t be available for a job, many times. That’s the main issue I had with this business. Do I really want to be scrambling to find someone to clean a house on a Saturday night?

I’ve thought a lot about Naval Ravikant’s quote on leverage:

You really just want a job, or a career, or a profession where your inputs don’t match your outputs. If you look at modern society, again this is later in the tweetstorm. Businesses that have high creativity and high leverage tends to be ones where you could do an hour of work, and it can have a huge effect. Or you can do 1,000 hours of work, and it can have no effect.

A cleaning company is not leveraged. That hour I put into solving the cleaning taking place IN TWELVE HOURS (😬) does not produce an outsized effect. It solves this problem, right now. It may provide a playbook on how to solve it again in the future. But that problem is still going to come up again in the future. When I evaluate my time… this isn’t what I want to be doing.

I’m a software guy. Software… isn’t flaky. People are. This was something I didn’t account for, and it ended up being the worst part of the project. Sure, I could just hire more, but I’m also risking making the bad problem even worse. Not worth it to me. I don’t have interest in continuing to work in that kind of environment.

The bad

Chasing leads is fun, then becomes a slog. We had a great CMS for helping us manage leads, but getting leads into that funnel is painful. Local Service Ads work. Yelp Ads and Facebook Ads are a racket. All of it doesn’t produce much output. And when cleaners force you to cancel, repeatedly, you’ve not only taken a lead and lit it on fire, you’re now exposing yourself to bad reviews.

Cleaning itself is also not very profitable. My margin was, on average, 10-20%. Recurring cleans increase margins, but most people aren’t interested in recurring cleans.

Part of this is the market. I’m in San Marcos, Texas - it’s a college town. It’s not a rich zip code. When we targeted expensive areas, we saw interest in recurring cleans. Still not enough to keep the business afloat. The growth rate slowed, and we reached a standstill after a few months.

One random bad thing that made me laugh: people scamming us for free cleans. We had one client who put a card on file, had us clean… and then we realized it was a bad card. We couldn’t charge it. He didn’t pick up our calls. One time, his mother-in-law angrily answered, and suspiciously asked who I was. The situation was absurd!

We learned lessons from that, but it was funny: I remembered that I’m dealing with real people, in my area - and some of them suck!

The good

Yes, there was good stuff too. I learned a ton building a sales pipeline. Shout out to the team at Cleaning Lead Machine. They’ve built an awesome CMS that I was able to build on top of. One small victory was running a campaign for realtors in our area. It was a drip campaign that lasted six weeks, and we had a few bites on it. The tooling was excellent - but we didn’t have the throughput to make it worthwhile.

Local SEO is a fun game, and I think if you play it right, in the right area, it can be huge. Shout out to the team at Cleaning Website Templates for putting together our site, cleaningsanmarcos.com. It ranks really well, enough so that we get calls from different counties in Texas, California, all sorts of other places nowhere near our operating area. Incredible work for a website that’s only three months old.

My VA did killer work on this project. She has been with me for two years now, and she took over all the day-to-day communication on Stars and Scrubs. She was out of her comfort zone, and still did an excellent job. It’s great to have someone on your team that you’ve worked with for a long time. Our instincts are lined up, which makes it easy to move quickly on things.

Conclusion

I had a lot of fun with this project. I will look back on it fondly. But it was a misguided adventure. I had big dreams of where it would go - dreams that were a little unreasonable. I learned a lot from it. I’m cutting my losses when it’s the right time to do so. I’m trying not to succumb to sunk-cost fallacy. Now, I can take some of the lessons I learned on marketing, sales, and especially sales automation, and apply it to the next project.