How We Built a Cleaning Business to Nearly $3M in 5 Years

Oak Bay Clean just hit the 5th anniversary of our very first booking. Jen and I were in Vancouver visiting Lola and Noel of Yaletown Clean, and I completely forgot the date until I got home and logged into our dashboard. I have a lot of thoughts about this milestone. This one runs long, but I think it will shift how you see your own five years.

Meeting Lola and Noel in person was a delight. Lola found us on YouTube a little over a year ago, started Yaletown Clean using our formula of location + keywords = your business name, and she is already at $30K/month. Jen and I are so proud of her. She brought on her partner Noel to run operations. Lola still works her day job in film SFX, and she is close to quitting her 9-to-5.

She is the first person we have coached since starting the channel who we have met in person. We need to do this more often. It fills our cup, and I think it is pretty cool for her to meet the YouTubers who changed the direction of her life.

Now, I’m reflecting on our own cleaning business journey and how far we’ve come in just five short years.

Here is our very first job, July 9, 2021, for a realtor who booked us for her client. The client had just moved in, boxes everywhere, and decided the home was not clean enough for her taste. We sent a cleaner named Mila, who is still one of our best. The realtor warned me on the phone that this one would be a challenge, and she was right. The client even asked Mila to help lift her boxes. We said no. We do not lift anything over 25 lbs, and we are there to clean, not to help someone move. She was not happy with us.

We learned a lot about our own boundaries that day. Now we only take move-in/move-out cleans when the home is completely empty, with hot water and electricity on, and the homeowner out of the house or in another room. Empty means empty.

Yesterday I left Simon to run the office (from his bedroom, on his laptop) and went to Vancouver with Jen. We had coffee, a long breakfast, took the ferry back to Victoria, and I did not think about the business once until I got home and looked at the calendar. Simon kept an eye on texts from clients and cleaners, and new callers went to voicemail with an autoresponder pointing them to our FAQs and online booking. I am fine missing a call or two now. There are no cleaning emergencies, and our cleaners are all in homes they know well, so I barely have to be reactive the way I was in year one.

Our total revenue is close to $3M, and I still can’t quite believe that number. It is so far from what Jen and I imagined in our first month or two. This is the power of recurring revenue: focusing on your ideal clients, setting solid boundaries, trusting the model and the systems we built, and not veering off track every time our entrepreneurial brains tell us to reinvent the wheel. My busy ADHD brain has tried many times to invent problems that don’t exist just so it has something to solve.

So now I play pickleball instead. I go to the gym. I coach owners in our Inner Circle, because I would rather share everything Jen and I have learned than start another business. I know myself well enough now to know I am a teacher at heart.

Rohan Gilkes and Kevin Perreira taught us the model through their old 21 Days to Launch Zoom course. Jen saw a Twitter thread in June 2021 breaking down why boring, local service businesses are so profitable and easy to replicate. She signed up and spent 21 days on Zoom with these two strangers. About two weeks in, she called me: “Hey, you need to move across the country and start this cleaning business with me. We are going to do exactly what they tell us to do. This guy has done $20M in revenue. We can too.”

And I said, “Ummmm, I hate cleaning, dude. But okay. What’s the catch?”

Jen said, “We sign up for their software. It’s $197 USD a month and it’s our website, our scheduling, and how we pay the cleaners. It does everything we need, and they show us how to use it.”

That was it. No $10,000 coaching program, no upsell. So that is what we did. Within a year we were at $50K/month, with all the usual struggles along the way. We stayed open and transparent with the community because we were so grateful to Kevin and Rohan for changing our lives. They asked us to put it all on YouTube and pay it forward.

So we do. And now you are here reading this, maybe running a cleaning company already, or wondering if you should start one.

I was a burned-out school teacher. Jen was juggling writing and directing, suddenly a single mom after 20 years of marriage, figuring out her next move while the pandemic shut down the film industry.

We are making our next movie next summer, and I produce with her. I can’t thank this cleaning company enough for giving us time to think again, and time to focus on what we actually want. We only get a short time here, and now we get to live on our own terms. No boss, no 9-to-5 taking our time and energy, no report cards for me to write anymore.

Today we have 20 cleaners. Jen’s middle son Simon (20) manages the day-to-day: schedule changes, last-minute access questions, payroll. I use AI like a champ to cut my own workload, which is how I get to write these newsletters to you. And yes, it is me writing them, not AI, though I do use AI to help me edit.

Now I am trying to picture our lives five years from now. We are going for $10M in total revenue from that first day, July 9, 2021, to July 9, 2031, with at least 81% of it recurring. We have goals to set to make it happen, and we will keep growing this business on our own terms. We also plan to have at least two movies out in the world in the next five years. That is a lot of ambition, and I think we can do it.