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How to start a remote cleaning company.
An interview with Liam Kircher, Co-Founder & CEO of CleanVentures.
Bryan Shankman
March 07, 2024
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Workbench, a resource-rich weekly newsletter for current and aspiring home service business owners.
We spoke with Liam Kircher, Co-founder and CEO of CleanVentures, a consulting firm that helps cleaning business owners in North America attract more clients, earn more money, and enjoy more freedom.
Before starting CleanVentures, Liam started his own remote cleaning company in his hometown of British Columbia, Canada, while working a full-time job in real estate at Redfin in Philadelphia.
In his first year, Liam generated $120k in revenue. After five years, he scaled this business to seven figures and ultimately sold the majority of his stake in it.
In our conversation with Liam, we discussed what inspired him to start his own business, the basics of starting a remote cleaning company, how to hire and scale, and much more.
The 7 Key Takeaways
Below are the 7 most essential insights from our conversation with Liam that you can apply to your business.
1. Escaping the 9-to-5 grind
Fresh out of college, Liam joined Redfin as a real estate agent and spent multiple hours commuting to the office and attending showings for his properties. Put plainly, he hated it.
During these extended hours spent in the car, Liam reflected on the education he got while watching his parents run their own cleaning company in Canada while Liam was a kid.
Based on his inside knowledge, Liam saw the residential cleaning business as his way out. He mentally devised a plan to start his own business to earn his freedom and escape his harrowing commute.
After graduation, I worked at Redfin for about one year. I quickly realized that I hated being a realtor. I had to drive on the turnpike in Philadelphia for hours, and I thought to myself how I couldn’t do this forever. I wanted to start my own thing so I could have control over my income and freedom. When I was growing up, my parents owned a residential cleaning company, so I learned about the industry as a little kid. I hit a point where I just said screw it, and thinking about my parent’s company thought, “Why don’t I just copy that and start my own?”
2. Four steps to start a remote cleaning business
Ready to earn his freedom and break free of the 9-5 grind, Liam threw caution to the wind and started to build his own remote cleaning company.
Liam was living in Philadelphia and planned to build a cleaning company in his hometown in Canada, which would present some unique challenges.
Like many first-time entrepreneurs, Liam didn’t know exactly what to do but knew he needed a few key things to get his business started:
Customers
Website
Google Presence
Business License
Like everyone, I didn't know what I was doing when they started their first company. I knew I needed a few things: a website (which I built on Wix), cleaners to do the job for me since I couldn’t go clean myself, a presence on Google so customers could find me, a CRM like Jobber, and a business license. I got right to it and set up all this in about a week.
Once Liam had the basics in place, he did something he wouldn’t do again: He looked for cleaners to be prepared to service any job. In hindsight, Liam says he should’ve first gotten some customers and then worried about finding the cleaners.
After everything was set up, I posted a job advertisement to find some cleaners. Now, I know that you should always find your customers first and then find people to hire, but I did it backward. It worked out, though—I started running Google Ads and drove a bunch of leads, and since I was decent at selling, I was able to close a couple. I booked my first job for just over $400 and was able to send a cleaner out to service it.
In these early days, Liam was piecing together the business and learning daily. For example, after his first job was complete, Liam had no payment processing, so his parents had to collect the money for him. Even with this choppy start, he soon hit smooth waters and eventually scaled to $120k in revenue in his first year.
I had no payment processing —really, nothing was set up. I had to call my parents to pick up the cash from the customer. It was an absolute Frankenstein business for the first year, but we did around $120k topline. Fast-forward four to five years, and I grew this Frankenstein business to over seven figures, which I think is pretty awesome.
3. Residential vs commercial cleaning
When starting a cleaning company, there are two categories to focus on: residential and commercial.
Residential refers to individual homes, while commercial focuses on higher-ticket clients like office buildings, universities, or hospitals. Residential is typically a volume game where a few commercial clients can make up most of your business.
Liam started in residential as this is where he had the most knowledge, but he was able to pivot to commercial after a few years. The benefits of commercial include:
Bigger customers
Long-term customers
Less churn risk
When I started out, 100% of my customers were residential customers in the $200 to $400 range, and residential is more of a volume game. As I progressed in my business, I got more comfortable going after commercial contracts. We went from $0 to $30k in our first month with commercial simply from outbound marketing. If I were starting a cleaning company today, I would begin with residential, especially if you don’t have a lot of capital. Once you’re up and running, you can start to approach commercial.
4. Starting in commercial with less than $10k
While residential cleaning offers a lower barrier to entry, the commercial cleaning business has a lot of upside.
Liam says that even though the commercial business is significant, starting it requires little capital. You can start relatively cheaply with a website, advertising, and the right equipment.
Liam recently launched a new location for a commercial cleaning business for a few thousand dollars.
Starting a commercial cleaning business can be done for less than $10k. You will have a few initial expenses, like your website, advertising, and equipment. You can spend $2 - $3 for the website and advertising. Then, for equipment, you’ll need vacuums, mops, buckets, rags, and a cleaning solution like EP50, and that’s about it. We just launched a new commercial cleaning location, and the start-up costs were down to a thousand bucks.
5. Winning a $55K contract with a billboard
While most business owners today focus their efforts on digital marketing channels, Liam leveraged a billboard to accelerate the growth of this commercial cleaning business shortly after it launched.
On a whim, Liam decided to put up a billboard in his city but expected little to come from it. To his surprise, this billboard resulted in a massive contract that his company still has today: cleaning hundreds of dorm rooms at a local university for a total contract value of $55,000 per year.
One day, I decided to put up a billboard. It was $800/month for six months, so I thought, ‘Let's try it out.’ The local university's property manager saw it and called me. I picked up immediately, which, if you're starting a cleaning company, one tip is to ALWAYS pick up the phone. The amount of money you're missing is insane. So I answered, and we ended up winning the $55K contract. It was our biggest job, with 24 cleaners in 12-hour shifts over three days. It's a hard job that we still have today, but I'm proud of it.
6. Hiring and managing cleaners
In all businesses, hiring is tough. When the job is physically demanding, it can even be more challenging. Liam has found that it’s best to be upfront and honest with the candidates he finds on Indeed.com so they know the challenges that come with the job he is hiring for.
By having a clear job description, expectations, and job performance criteria, you can position yourself to attract top talent.
One of the most common questions from new cleaning business owners is, “How do I hire people?” One of the main things I tell them is to hire people who share your values and those of your company. For my businesses, we use Indeed.com to find candidates. If you post on there, you’ll get a ton of applicants, so you’ll want to make sure your job description is clear and that you have clear expectations around job performance. Cleaning a house is not sexy; it’s a tough job, and I’m honest with my cleaners. I pay them well and share the purpose behind what I’m doing as a business owner.
Hiring well also leads to opportunities for internal promotions. Liam promoted a cleaning staff member to Operations Manager, and she became an integral part of Liam’s business.
I want to focus on sales, and I’m fortunate to have a fantastic Operations Manager we promoted internally. I’ll admit that I got very lucky with this person. When I promoted her, she was able to take ~90% of the people management tasks off my plate within the first 30 days. She’s crushing it.
6. Sharing learnings through CleanVentures
After scaling his remote cleaning company to seven figures, Liam sold his stake in the company to focus on CleanVentures—a consulting firm that helps cleaning business owners in North America attract better clients, make more money, and enjoy more freedom.
Through CleanVentures, Liam can help new entrepreneurs start their cleaning businesses and help existing owners scale their businesses.
CleanVentures is the parent company of what my co-founder Spencer Stevenson (@thewashboss) and I are working on. We’ve combined our knowledge and skills to do two things: help people get started in the cleaning space and help people create better cleaning companies. We provide free education and information for people who want to get started, as well as coaching and consulting for companies looking to scale and invest.
7. Transitioning from side hustle to full-time
Many clients Liam works with at CleanVentures own remote cleaning businesses as a side hustle and are interested in going full-time.
Liam works with these clients to better understand the opportunity cost of not focusing on their business and doing the math on how much money they could make.
In some cases, he and his clients realized sticking with their day jobs could be losing them money.
When helping a business owner transition from a side hustle to a full-time business, the biggest thing is we need to understand their commitment level. Are they ready to go full-time in this business? We can help them transition from their day job to full-time business owners if they have leads, decent revenue, and a solid foundation. They could be spending eight hours a day at their job or eight hours on the business - which would potentially have more value. You might be losing money by not focusing on the business.
Starting a business is hard, but if you can pay the bills with your day job and slowly build up your business at the same time, there can be a great payoff down the road. The real fun begins when you find a product-market fit and are ready to go all in.
Wow! You made it to the end; thanks for sticking with us.
The full interview with Liam is available on YouTube below, Spotify here, and Apple Podcasts here.