How many cleaners do I need before advertising?

Five to eight cleaners, registered and available, before you spend a dollar on ads for customers.

Why recruiting comes first

If you have fewer cleaners than that, you’ll sell jobs you can’t fill. Then you’re cancelling on customers, and your reviews take the damage.

Reviews are the hardest thing in this business to rebuild. A cancelled first cleaning doesn’t just lose one job. It costs you the review that would have brought the next customer.

Demand without cleaners just means cancelled jobs and bad reviews. So before you put money into marketing a new area, check that the cleaners are there first.

What “registered and available” means

Not five names on a list. Five to eight professionals who have been vetted, have agreed to how you work, and actually have open time in their week.

Remember that independent professionals control their own schedules. You can’t tell them to work set days, so you need enough of them that someone is free when a booking comes in.

How I vet a cleaner before their first job

You don’t know them yet, so you start with baseline indicators:

• A phone call where you explain how the referral model works.
• An application covering supplies, reliable transportation, service radius and years of experience.
• At least two years of residential cleaning. Cleaning a hospital or a hotel isn’t the same as cleaning someone’s home.
• References: three professional, from cleaning customers who can speak to their work, and three personal, who can speak to their character.
• Some presence of their own: reviews, a website or a social profile.

Then send them to a test clean. Keep it easy, like a one-bed, one-bath, and let the customer’s feedback be the real test. If they’re not a good fit, be honest with them. Don’t string them along.

Common questions

Solo cleaners or teams?

Either works. A solo cleaner can handle about a two-bed, two-bath in a reasonable time. Once you get to bigger homes, around four beds and 2,500 square feet, one person usually isn’t enough, so it helps to have some teams on your roster.

What keeps good cleaners around?

Getting paid for the work matters, and so does flexibility. A lot of cleaners have their own families and their own clients. Booking software lets them set their own schedule, and as independent contractors they have to have that control anyway.

Where do I find them?

Start where cleaners already are: Facebook groups and job boards. My first cleaning partner came from a Facebook group. I told her I knew how to market and had a new company, and explained how we’d split the work.