Building a cleaning company

Since early February, I’ve been working on building a cleaning company.

That business is now up and running! It’s called Stars and Scrubs - a residential cleaning company, based in San Marcos, Texas.

I wanted to document the experience of building this company as it’s radically different from the other projects I generally work on. Here’s a rundown.

Why?

I like home service businesses. They’re sneakily an operations play - which is probably the most fun I have running a business. I like systems. Over time, you contruct a very complex pipeline/workflow of how the business runs, from “client wants to schedule a cleaning” to “the cleaning is done”, and at any point in time, you can zoom in one piece of that pipeline and tweak it. And the end goal is very easy to reason about as well. It’s just bookings. Bookings = revenue. Very simple. You can introduce complex financials over time, but at first, you don’t really need to. Are you getting enough bookings? If yes, you reach your revenue goals. If not - you need more bookings. Simple.

I also like that it’s local. It’s incredibly additive to my local newsletter, SMTX Life (more on that in this blog post). I’m bullish on local businesses and human-first stuff right now. The cleaning business will be the primary advertiser on the newsletter, so it’s free lead-gen on top of a project I’m already building.

Apps

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.

I could build almost all of this myself - I’m a full-stack dev. But the fun and interesting part of this is using off-the-shelf tools, built for this purpose. I’m using Cleaning Lead Machine, which is a white-label version of GoHighLevel. It does all of the workflow stuff for retaining customers. Most cleaning businesses get a customer, hope they transition to recurring, and if they don’t, bummer! They don’t have time to follow up. CLM does the follow-up, tracks all leads in a pipeline, and basically builds a system by default for handling leads from start to finish.

My website is also done by a team - over at cleaningwebsitetemplates.com. They build an SEO-optimized website for the business, and take care of all the hosting. This is the part I could do myself, but I enjoy the way the site looks, and I know they’re doing this at scale, so the decisions they make are backed by the fact they’re doing double-digit number of other cleaning sites at the same time.

More to come

What else should I write about here? I’ll talk about:

• Interviewing cleaners
• Managing leads
• SEO and lead gen using advertising
• What happens if becomes really awesome?

But for now, I have to get back to work. More to come!