Jordan vs. Nancy: Who Is Your Cleaning Business Actually For?

One persona you build for. One you design around. Here's how to figure out which is which in your city.

# Jordan vs. Nancy: Who Is Your Cleaning Business Actually For?

One persona you build for. One you design around. Here's how to figure out which is which in your city.

4 minutes of reading time.

A few years into running our cleaning business , I dove deep into online learning and somehow ended up in the Digital Marketing Goat's mastermind group. Russ Henneberry co-wrote Digital Marketing for Dummies , and he's someone a lot of online marketers follow closely. He also happens to be a former school teacher, just like me, so his teaching style really resonates with me.

Anyway, why does this matter? Even though I've been selling stuff since I was 12, I had never heard of the concept of the "customer journey" until I started paying attention to Russ' content. It seemed so obvious once he explained it clearly, and now I want to pass that along to you.

Something I kept saying before I understood this stuff: "We're not for everyone and that's okay." That's still true. The difference now is I know exactly who we are for.

Now, everyone we coach focuses their energy on what my AI calls "Jordan personas" instead of "Nancy types." Let me explain.

Jordan is busy and wants an easy solution to their most pressing problem: housework. Jordan looks online, reads reviews, and books with their credit card. Easy. Low maintenance. I love Jordan.

Here's how the AI described Jordan:

"Jordan is a 34-48-year-old professional living in a detached home or townhouse in Oak Bay, North Saanich, South Fairfield, or the Gordon Head area of Saanich. They work in tech, provincial government, healthcare administration, or real estate, earning a household income of $130,000-$200,000+, and Victoria's brutal cost of living means their most rationed resource isn't money, it's time. They found you on Google, booked online in under three minutes while sitting on the SkyTrain or waiting for a meeting to start, and they will happily pay $280 for a bi-weekly clean without blinking if you simply show up reliably and leave the house smelling clean."

Funny side note: we don't have a SkyTrain in my city, but Vancouver does. Ah, AI. Despite that one error, the rest is accurate. I'll take it.

Then I asked the AI to describe the opposite of Jordan. I gave it a few pieces of content, including complaints we'd received in the past. It came up with "Nancy, the cash-strapped retiree":

"Nancy is a 60-75-year-old retired or semi-retired homeowner who has lived in her house, often in Esquimalt, James Bay, older parts of Saanich, or even a heritage home in Oak Bay, for 20 or 30 years. She is not a difficult person; she is a person whose expectations, habits, and budget are fundamentally mismatched with what a modern, systemized cleaning business can profitably deliver. She wants a deep relationship with a cleaner (not a company), she wants to watch the work being done, and she will negotiate the price every single time if you let her. She is the reason your team dreads certain routes."

Oh, Nancy. Have you met her yet?

The AI said "She is not a difficult person" and honestly, yes, yes she is.

But I'll take it a step further. Nancy has been doing the cleaning work in her home her entire life, unpaid and unappreciated. The home is very much her domain. She's the boss in there, whether she wants to be or not. So she balks at the price, and then criticizes the cleaners for not cleaning up to her standard.

She says things like " Well for this price I expect... "

Nancy is about 18% of the demographics in my city. The joke about Victoria is that it's full of "newly weds and nearly deads" -- so she's very real, and she's everywhere. Hudson Williams, one of the Heated Rivalry stars, said this about his recent visit to Victoria :

“ 30 minutes away from Vancouver. Dead as f—. Old people.”

Hudson Williams

Once you understand your Jordans versus your Nancys, things start to shift. For us, we made every single communication speak to Jordan, while letting Nancy filter herself out. And Nancy isn't always a woman, by the way. She's not always a senior either. The tell is always the same: "How much is it?" before anything else, or "I just have a few questions" and then it's eight questions every time.

Kevin, one of our mentors and the founder of Convertlabs , has a rule: "If they ask more than 3 questions when they call you, they're not the right client for you."

One more thing about Nancy. The old school cleaning business model was built for her. Hourly rates, letting the client dictate what gets cleaned each visit. She's used to that model, and that's fine. Literally every other cleaning company in our city caters to Nancy.

Our model is different. It's for people who want the cleaning done and have zero interest in managing how it gets done. They're outsourcing to us so they never have to think about it. That's the whole point. And that's exactly why our model works so well for Jordan.

If you want to see our full Jordan and Nancy profiles, the ones we actually use to make decisions at our cleaning company, I've put them here for you: Cleaning Company Client Persona Profiles .

And if you want to build yours for your own city, I've put together a single AI prompt that does it in one pass. Paste it into ChatGPT or Claude, swap in your city, and you'll have both personas in about 10 minutes: Build Your Personas with AI . There are some bonus prompts in there for how you can actually use the personas too.

Go find your Jordans.

Victoria

P.S. Russ is doing a live workshop on how to use AI for marketing with our Inner Circle members on March 22nd. If you missed the founding member window, reply with "waitlist" and I'll make sure you hear about it first when we open enrolment again.

P.P.S. Got any funny or painful Nancy stories? Hit reply, I want to hear them. We can laugh and cringe together.