Where I started
Six years in, three cleaners, about forty domestic clients and a couple of small offices. Profitable, and completely dependent on me remembering things.
Everything lived in my head or in a diary. If I was ill the whole week wobbled. I took four days off in three years and spent all four on the phone.
What I struggled with
Repetition without consistency. Every cleaner did the job slightly differently, every client had slightly different arrangements, and nothing was written down anywhere someone else could find it.
New staff took about six weeks to become useful because training was me talking while we worked.
What changed
I used the Toolkit to get the internal side written down first, before the client facing documents. Cleaning standards, the visit checklist, key handling, what to do when nobody answers the door, the complaints process.
Then the client side. Same terms for everyone, same onboarding, same cancellation policy. It took two evenings of answering questions and a weekend of actually implementing it.
The difference it made
Training dropped from six weeks to about ten days because there is something to hand someone. Two of my cleaners now run their own days without checking in.
I took a proper week off last autumn. Two phone calls, both about things I had genuinely not documented, which I then documented.
Where I am now
Same size business, roughly the same turnover, entirely different to run. I am thinking about a second area next year, which I would never have considered when everything depended on me.
Someone asked last year whether I would ever sell it. Before, the honest answer was that there was nothing to sell but me. That has changed.
Claire Underwood's advice for other cleaning entrepreneurs
- Document the internal standards before the client facing paperwork.
- If it only exists in your head, it is not a system, it is a risk.
- Take a week off and write down everything that breaks. That is your list.