About · Cleaning Company Blueprint

Before any of this

Two sisters from the Ottawa Valley.

Vic and Jen grew up in Ontario. By 2020, Jen had been writing full-time in Victoria, BC, for fifteen years while raising her three kids. Vic was working at a family winery in Niagara after years teaching in London and running a teacher recruitment agency in Victoria. The sisters had been making independent films together for more than a decade. Elliot: The Littlest Reindeer (2018) is on Netflix.

Disney, 1981.

Vic and Jen at the Berlinale film festival

Winning awards at Berlinale for Jen's screenplay.

2021

Three things changed at once.

In 2021, the pandemic had shut down the film industry and no money was coming in from filmmaking. Jen, in Victoria, was in the middle of a divorce after twenty years of marriage, with three kids relying on her.

Vic had wrapped up the winery years and gone back to teaching in Niagara to help cover an Ontario teacher shortage. So many retirement-age teachers had retired at once when the COVID classroom became impossible. She took a six-month contract role. When it ended, she was laid off.

Two sisters, neither with a steady income, both wondering what came next.

The turn

A free Zoom course.

Then Jen stumbled across a Twitter thread by Rohan Gilkes. Rohan had built local service businesses and laid out, step by step, exactly how to start one. The thread mapped a path from zero to $50,000 a month in revenue.

Rohan was teaching the course on Zoom, free, while the world was locked down. Jen called Vic and said "We're doing this thing next." Vic said "What? I hate cleaning." Jen said "Go take the course."

They took the course. Vic packed up Niagara and moved to Victoria, BC, to start the business with Jen and get back to making movies.

The build

How Oak Bay Clean grew to $2.8M in four years.

In 22 days, they registered the business, built a website, set up online booking, picked their pricing, and landed their first client. Most of that was them following Rohan's steps. Some of it was figuring out what to adapt for Victoria, BC.

Vic answered the phone and ran job estimates. Jen handled the brand, the website, and the systems. By the end of year one, Oak Bay Clean was hitting $63,000 a month. By year three it had crossed $2.8M in revenue (four years). Margins held around 28%. The phone got answered on the first try, almost always.

$2.8M Oak Bay Clean revenue (4 yrs)

28% Profit margins

22 days From idea to first client

3 years From launch to $2.8M in four years

Vic and Jen will be the first to say they didn't invent any of this. The model was already proven. They followed the steps and adapted what needed adapting.

What happened next

Kevin and Rohan asked them to share.

About a year into Oak Bay Clean, Kevin (the founder of ConvertLabs, the platform Vic and Jen ran the business on) and Rohan reached out. They had watched what Vic and Jen had built. They asked: would they be willing to share what they had learned, on YouTube, free, for people who couldn't afford a coaching program?

That is how the YouTube channel started. The 21 Days to Launch series went up free. Vic and Jen had been handed the model by two strangers who shared it for free. Returning the favour was the whole point.

The channel grew. People started reaching out: Sandra in North Carolina, Selali in London, Ryan in Halifax, Nakita in Virginia. The conversations made one thing clear. Vic and Jen's version of the model ran differently than the one most cleaning business coaches were teaching.

The approach

What makes this method different.

The standard playbook in cleaning business coaching is expensive and built around leads first, cleaners second. Pay for leads, automate the customer experience, push hard on conversion, and deal with the burnout when it comes.

Vic and Jen built Oak Bay Clean the other way around. Cleaners first, clients second. There's a shortage of cleaners, not a shortage of clients. The model runs on organic leads, SEO, online booking with transparent pricing, and clients who let their cleaners do the work and respect the people doing it. It's faster than paying for leads forever, and the businesses built on it last.

By 2025, Vic had run 144 discovery calls and the patterns were clear enough to act on. That is what eventually became The Inner Circle.

The room

Forty-seven founding members and counting.

The Inner Circle started in early 2026 as weekly accountability calls. Forty-seven cleaning business owners showed up as founding members on April 1, 2026. They came from Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, and South Africa.

The structure now is four phases (The Leap, The Engine, The Boring Phase, The Other Side), seven mentors who each run a real cleaning business one stage ahead of the people they mentor, and a weekly Zoom that runs every Wednesday at noon Pacific.

Doors open to new members on Wednesday July 1, 2026, and close one week later. The room is intentionally small. Each cohort caps so members can actually know each other.

What the business bought

Now they make movies again.

The cleaning business pays the bills. That was the point.

Vic produces films, runs Oak Bay Clean, and coaches inside the Inner Circle. She spends less than two hours a day on the cleaning company itself. The rest of her time goes to films, the Inner Circle, the YouTube channel, and a personal challenge she set this year: getting one thousand rejections in twelve months.

Jen writes and directs again. She's president of the board of Cinevic, the local film cooperative in Victoria, edits the Cleaning Company Blueprint YouTube channel, and coaches inside the Inner Circle. Her three kids are growing up too fast. When she's not writing, working at Cinevic, or with the kids, she's learning to fly fish and golf.

Jen and her kids, who are growing up too fast.

The cleaning business is what gives both of them the headroom to do the work they came here to do.

Where this goes

We coach others because it changed our lives.

The cleaning business gave Vic and Jen back their time and their freedom. The Inner Circle is the room where they share the playbook with other owners building toward that same kind of headroom.

If that sounds like the kind of room you'd like to be in, the newsletter is the simplest way to start.

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