Cleaning Business Burnout (And Why Your Brain Wants You to Quit)

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My burnout has come from running other people's companies and feeling as though I did not own my own time. I started a cleaning company to fix that, and then recreated the same problem inside a business I owned.

Jen and I have taken Oak Bay Clean to $2.8M in sales. I go to yoga on a weekday. Both of those things are true, and getting from the first to the second took undoing almost everything I thought a business owner was supposed to do.

The short answer

• You are the biggest threat to your own business. Not the market, not your competitors.
• The urge to quit arrives disguised as everything else. Arguments with your spouse. No time. Bad luck. It will not announce itself.
• There is no such thing as a cleaning emergency. Juan is a firefighter. His clients wait.
• Saying no to the wrong client protects your cleaner. I have fired far more clients than cleaners.
• Take the hour. Yours and your cleaners'.

Why your brain wants you to quit

At some point you will want to stop. That feeling is not a verdict on your business. It is your brain doing its job.

The part of your brain pushing you to quit does not hate you. It thinks its job is to keep you safe and alive, and as far as it is concerned, where you are right now is safe and alive, so its work is done. It views anything that takes you out of that safety as a threat.

It will be on you all day, every day. And it rarely arrives as "I want to quit." It arrives as friction everywhere else. You start fighting with your spouse. There is suddenly so much conflict. You do not have time. This business is causing so much strife.

That is the resistance. Knowing what it is does not make it stop. It does let you look at it and say: I know what you are.

Fear is a phase, and it passes

Jen is the shy one. She does not like the phone. When Oak Bay Clean got its first client in 2021, a wealthy household with a Bentley and an enormous house, she could not sit still while our cleaners were inside it.

"I was like, oh my God, what if they break something. I had to go walk the dog for the whole time. I was so scared. And now I'm just like, nah, we have insurance, who cares, it's fine. I'm totally different now." Jen

She was not being irrational. She was being new. The fear is a brain thing and it changes.

Rohan, who has been on our channel and has done over $20M in sales himself, describes the same thing from further back:

"I would see other people's success and create excuses to explain away why it wouldn't work for me." Rohan

And, later in the same talk:

"It turns out this dark room was a place in my mind I had created for myself. I had become my own captor. The enemy was me." Rohan

His line that stuck with me: rewiring their brain was not an outcome of their success, it was a prerequisite. It had to happen first.

There is no such thing as a cleaning emergency

This one took me the longest to learn.

When you are new, every text, every phone call and every complaint turns into the feeling that something is on fire. A client wants something now. A cleaner needs to change her schedule today. Your whole body says drop everything.

Juan is a firefighter who built a cleaning business on the side. During the day, Juan is literally saving lives. His clients wait. He cannot stop fighting a fire to answer some sort of emergency in cleaning.

Just because a client wants you to jump does not mean you have to say how high. Just because a cleaner suddenly needs to change her schedule does not mean you drop everything this second.

I run Juan in my head whenever I feel the spiral start.

Saying no is your superpower

Our model is built for busy people who do not have the time or the energy to micromanage a cleaner. So the client who wants to micromanage a cleaner is not a difficult client. They are a client for a different business.

The ones I say no to:

• Clients who need constant back and forth communication. That is the thing that breaks this model.
• Clients who freak out over tiny details.
• The ones who write an essay explaining exactly how they want the cleaning done.
• The ones who want perfection promised in a single clean.

When somebody sends us a novel asking whether our cleaner will clean the toilet with a toothbrush exactly the way they want, the answer is no, she will not.

Our cleaners are human and they do make mistakes. Every no you say protects your energy and your cleaner's energy.

"I've fired way more clients than I have cleaners." Vic

Jen got there too, in her own words: "I used to have all these jobs where I was looking for shitty people. Now I come up against one of those and I'm just out."

Not every client is the right fit for this model, and that is good news. More on the economics of this in how to scale a cleaning business.

The mistake I made: hiring people to escape the boring work

I did not want to do the mundane, nitty-gritty daily work. It felt overwhelming. So I hired virtual assistants and handed it off, because I made the mistake of listening to the wrong people.

"Bless their hearts, they were great people, but I lost control of our company in a way, and I ended up creating more work for myself. I was reinventing the wheel. None of it I needed to do." Vic

We run Oak Bay Clean with no virtual assistants now. I took the boring work back and fine-tuned the systems instead of adding people to them.

Adding a person to a process you have not fixed gives you a broken process and a payroll.

I stopped answering every call

I used to answer every phone call the second it rang. Now the phone rings and I let it ring.

The automated response tells the caller I am busy, points them to online booking, and links the FAQ. I call back when I have finished what I was doing. I do not let it interrupt my flow anymore.

This sits oddly next to the other thing I say constantly, which is that answering the phone wins you business. Both are true. Thomas won a four year contract cleaning an Air Force base because the other companies in town let it ring. The difference is that answering the phone is a job with a time and a place, and being available every waking second is not a job, it is a condition.

What I do not do is advertise 24/7 availability on Google. Plenty of cleaning companies do. They are writing a promise their future self has to keep.

The hour

Kevin, who built Convertlabs and sold his own cleaning company, calls burnout a symptom of neglecting yourself or your time. His prescription is an hour a day with the phone away and the notifications off. It does not matter what you do with it.

"It's about being off screen and it's about not talking to human beings." Kevin

He also went camping, backpacking and fishing, and says the business is always better when he comes back.

Mine is yoga. Jen tells me I should stop talking about it on the channel because I talk about it too much. I am that annoying yoga person.

Before I go to a class, I open Convertlabs and check whether any cleaner is going out to a new client. Cleaners heading to recurring clients need nothing from me. They know the house, the client, the code, the phone number. They are fine. If somebody has a new client and I am about to be unreachable, I text her first: heads up, I am not available for the next hour, you have everything you need, and I will be back after that.

That is the whole trick. Anticipate where the problem will come from, handle it in advance, and then go.

I also block one hour in the morning for all communication. Email, texts, calling clients, all of it in one block. I took that from Nir Eyal's Indistractable, which has changed my life. His argument is that you should look at what happens immediately before a distraction. Right before you pick up your phone to look at Instagram, what are you feeling? Boredom. Stress. Anxiety. That feeling is the thing to deal with, and Instagram is only a tool that shows up to answer it.

And I keep hours. I am a nine to five girl. I set those hours for a reason.

Your cleaners burn out too

A cleaner doing three, four, five jobs a day is on the same road you are.

They need vacations. They need a schedule that does not eat their evenings. We pay 60% of every job, which works out around $45 an hour against a going rate of about $22 in our city.

Kevin says protecting your cleaners from burnout is as important as protecting yourself. He is right, and it is also the cheaper of the two problems to prevent.

Turn off your entrepreneurial brain

The model is simple. Need clients? Find them. Too many clients and not enough cleaners? Hire cleaners. It stays that simple until you go looking for complexity.

Sandra rebuilt her branding, bought the car decals and the logo shirts, and eventually went back and did the whole course again, because she had drifted so far from a model that was already working.

I do it too, in my own way.

"Jen is creative, she has creative projects. What I've discovered running this business is that I need to do my creative things. Sewing, gardening, reading, learning Spanish again. If I'm not focused on those other things, I will create my own problems in this business. And it is so dumb." Vic

This is not our passion project. Our passion project is the things we love doing. The cleaning company is what buys us the time to do them, and the day I forget that is the day I invent a crisis to solve.

Rohan calls the thing you need discipline, and says it beats motivation every single time. Lauren, a bodybuilder in our community, gave us a better phrase for it: aggressive patience. That is a hundred percent true in the cleaning industry.

Take two to three bookings a day. Hire one to two cleaners a month. Fire the clients who mistreat your people. Go to yoga.

If someone else has already done it, why can't you?

Frequently asked questions

Why do I want to quit my new cleaning business?

Because the part of your brain that wants you to stop believes its job is to keep you safe, and it thinks where you are right now is already safe. It views the risk you are taking as a threat. It rarely arrives as "I want to quit". It arrives as arguments with your spouse, sudden conflict, and the feeling that you do not have time. That is resistance, and it usually peaks in the first few months.

How do I avoid burnout running a cleaning business?

Take an hour a day with your phone away and notifications off. Keep set hours. Stop answering every call, and use an automated response that points people to online booking. Before you go offline, check whether any cleaner is heading to a new client and text them in advance. Kevin from Convertlabs describes burnout as a symptom of neglecting yourself or your time, and the fix is to stop neglecting it.

Should I hire a virtual assistant for my cleaning business?

Vic hired virtual assistants to escape the boring daily work and ended up losing control of the company and creating more work for herself. Oak Bay Clean runs with none today. Fix the system before you add a person to it, or you will have a broken system and a payroll.

Which cleaning clients should I say no to?

The ones who need constant back and forth communication, freak out over tiny details, write an essay about exactly how the cleaning should be done, or want perfection promised in a single clean. The model is built for busy people who do not have time to micromanage a cleaner, so a client who wants to micromanage is a client for a different business. Vic has fired far more clients than cleaners.

How do I stop treating every client message as an emergency?

Juan, a firefighter who built a cleaning business on the side, is literally saving lives during the day and his clients wait. Just because a client wants you to jump does not mean you have to say how high, and just because a cleaner needs to change her schedule does not mean you drop everything this second.

How do I stop my cleaners from burning out?

Watch the load. A cleaner doing three, four or five jobs a day is heading for the same wall you are. Give them vacations, protect their schedule, and pay them well. Oak Bay Clean pays 60% of every job, which works out to around $45 an hour, because a cleaner who is not exhausted stays.