$780K with 28% margins. Just Jen and me.

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It's easier to find 100 ideal clients than 1,000 nightmare clients. Most cleaning business owners do the opposite. They pour their energy into lead generation, funnels, click-through rates, impressions, and automated sequences.

Jen and I run the business in the other direction.

I was on a podcast last week (the episode comes out in a couple of months). The host runs a cleaning business doing $1.6M a year. Sounds impressive, right?

Let's go a level deeper.

He runs at 17% profit margins. He has an operations manager, two virtual assistants, a lead generation machine, and he's troubleshooting all day. On the call, he told me he's almost sold his business 12 times in the last 3 months. He's burnt out and wants out.

Jen and I did $780K over the last 12 months. Less impressive on the headline number, right?

We run at 28% profit margins. It's just Jen and me. Jen handles the money, design, and SEO. The rest of her week she's writing screenplays, taking director meetings, and trying to get her next movie made. I handle the things I'm good at: clients, hiring and onboarding cleaners, and the day-to-day. We don't have an operations manager because the work doesn't ask for one.

We did try two full-time VAs back when I was listening to the wrong people. It just meant more work for me, and busywork for them in between client calls. I'm willing to admit I got pulled into the other way of running a business. Men have been doing it that way forever. Surely the guy at $1.6M knew more than me?

He didn't.

Four years in, hundreds of one-on-one discovery calls later, and after watching every cleaning business YouTuber I can find, I've landed on the one thing that matters most.

There are two camps in this space.

The first camp is where the $1.6M guy lives. They don't know who their ideal customer is, and they don't plan their business around her, because they don't care who she is. That's a fair choice. They have a business, it pays the bills, it employs people, and they get a lot of leads. Lots and lots of leads. They pay for those leads, and they talk constantly about optimization and scalability. They sound like they know what they're doing because they say it with so much confidence. They use whichever booking platform comes recommended (it doesn't matter which), and they probably use GoHighLevel, which is a waste of money I'll rant about another day. For now, just know they pay more to get less.

The second camp is slower and more methodical. We look hard at who we're trying to serve and why that matters most. We build the business from the name to the words on the website to the lead form that sends seven emails optimized to actually convert. For us, that's a 33% conversion rate.

When I say that number out loud in the first camp, their eyes light up. They don't believe me. The host I was talking to kept dismissing me with, "Well, I don't know what it's like in Canada, but here in America..." I finally cut in: "Actually, we've taught more Americans than Canadians this approach, and it's working everywhere people apply it." That ended the Canadian-exception angle.

So what's the actual difference?

We work less, make more, and think more. The question we ask isn't "get me ALL the leads." It's "get me 100 great recurring clients, because I know that's $500K a year, and then I can optimize until the cows come home."

A 33% conversion rate. So how many leads is that?

A few hundred. The math: 3 times 100 is 300, then a buffer, so roughly 350 leads to land 100 clients.

The real question after that: who are those 350 people? What do they care about? What do they value? Will we still take phone calls from the wrong leads in our first six months? Yes, every single one. Will we sign on the wrong clients more times than we'd like? Yes. That's part of finding your people.

It's the same with these newsletters. There are 750 of you reading this. Jen and I have grown that list organically: one link on our YouTube channel, plus the email of every person who bought a digital product or used our affiliate link for Convertlabs. That's it.

If I wanted 75,000 of you, I know how to do that. The math just doesn't ask for it.

We have 48 people inside our Inner Circle. 40 are paying members at $47 USD/month. 7 are mentors. 1 is on a scholarship Jen and I provide, for a member who would have had to choose between joining us and feeding her kids.

40 members at $47/month is $1,880 a month. Annualized, that's $22,560. People will leave, others will replace them. The math holds for the point I'm making.

Do we want 400 members at ten times the revenue eventually? Yes. Starting with 40 of the right members means we get to know them deeply: what they're stuck on, where they're winning and why. When we open up another 40 spots, it'll be on our terms, when we're ready.

We can do that with these newsletters and a small YouTube channel that publishes real, in-depth content for the 40-some people we're actually here for.

The other option is to "boost" our YouTube posts and look very impressive. 100,000 views feels like proof of something. It's just paying for eyeballs.

Going viral is the same trap with extra glitter. A million views on a cleaning business video sounds like proof of something. Most of those viewers are scrolling on the couch and will close the tab in 90 seconds. Compare that to 1,000 views from someone who typed "how to start a cleaning business" into YouTube last Tuesday. Those 1,000 are looking with intent. One of them is you, reading this email right now. The math always favors the people who are already searching.

Our slow approach is working. We focus on our ideal people, attract them into our orbit, solve their actual problems, and keep the work peaceful enough to last. The people I used to think knew way more than us are asking us onto their podcasts so they can change their own businesses to look more like ours. More peaceful. More profitable. In less time.

We all dream of selling our businesses one day. 28% profit margins, 81% recurring revenue, 80% of clients booking online, organic search, zero marketing budget. That's far more attractive to a buyer in 2026 than the other camp's setup.

Louder for the back of the room: this is your business. You get to decide how to build it and run it. That's the best part of this whole thing.

If it's scary because it's new, sit with that for a minute. Have you done scary things before? Did they go the way you were most scared they'd go? This one is scary too. It's also a totally different way of making money in this world. We're having a real impact on the people we serve, and we're living the lives we always wanted, on our terms, in our way.

Which brings me to Tofino. I'm going next weekend. It's a four-hour drive, and when I arrive I get to walk on the longest beach in Canada (called, helpfully, Long Beach), watching surfers in the mist, hopefully spotting a whale. I love whales.

The last time I went to Tofino, I was camping with an old friend, her daughter, my niece, and my nephew. It poured the entire weekend. Not normal rain. Pacific Northwest rainforest downpour, the kind where you have to buy ridiculous yellow raincoats that look like Newfoundland fishermen wear. I called Jen to complain about all the rain. She goes, "Vic. I just saw a pod of orcas swim past our beach. Like 10 of them."

Jen and I live a block from the beach in Victoria, BC. She had sun. I had a fisherman's coat.

That's what I mean when I say our work has become our vacation. For Jen, writing full-time is the vacation. For me, the gym in the middle of the day and writing these to you is the fun part. When we do take real time off, we just start new projects. One day, we'll host an in-person retreat with all of you so you can see what we mean. It'll be small. Connection beats large conferences every time.

How about you? Is this resonating? Are you starting to shift toward calm over chaos?

If you're sitting there thinking, "Okay, fine, 100 Jordans sounds great, but HOW do I find them?", next week is leads month inside the Inner Circle. We're going deep on who Jordan is, what she cares about, and exactly how every part of our business is built to bring her into our orbit.

If you missed founding member enrollment, I'm putting something together for you. I'll announce it soon. Keep watching the YouTube channel and reading these emails, and tell me what's coming up for you.

I read every reply, and your answers shape what we make next. So hit reply, leave comments on the videos, and keep the feedback coming.

Until next time, hug the ones you love. Breathe. Slow down. Step away from the screen and touch grass. It matters more than you know.

Vic