To make millions, think smaller

I know. Bear with me.

# To make millions, think smaller

I know. Bear with me.

I had two coaching calls the other day. Both of them wanted to name their cleaning business after a wide area — one was thinking country-wide, the other city-wide. Both were tired of capped salaries and wanted to make a lot more money, with a view to quitting their jobs and getting some of their time back.

I told them both the same thing: go smaller.

The owners I've watched build sustainable, profitable cleaning businesses keep doing this. They pick a zone, plant their flag, and get really good at serving it.

Jake and Emi did this in Dubuque, Iowa. Population 60,000. They hit $14,000 in revenue in their first two months while working their full-time jobs, in a market that most people would have looked at and said there's not enough here.

There was plenty.

Ash and Adam run Cincy Maids and Wexford Cleaning out of Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. Two hyper-local brands, two focused markets, $25K a month in under a year. Ash described his workday to me once and I think about it all the time:

"I'd say I work 12 hours a day, but during those 12 hours, I'm golfing, I'm going to the gym, I'm playing poker. If the phone rings, I'll answer it and deal with it, then go back to whatever I want to do."

Then I got this reply to my last newsletter, from someone who built it the other way:

"I built fast because that's the program I was in — literally every day we were working on a new LSA. At one point we had 8. It's exhausting. Plus you have to keep recruiting all over the place because you don't know where your jobs are coming from. I want off this merry-go-round."

You don't need millions of customers. You need a couple hundred. A couple hundred recurring clients in one focused area is a life-changing business. Real income. Real margin. Real time freedom.

Jen and I live in Oak Bay, Victoria, BC. Oak Bay has a population of about 30,000 people. Victoria has about 400,000. We named our company Oak Bay Clean with the domain OakBayClean.com . Anyone who lives here knows Oak Bay is where the well-off live — their brain makes the connection: if they clean for the Oak Bay'ers, they can clean for me too. It also crushes SEO on Google and in AI search. Location + keywords = your business name. You've literally got the name for the query "cleaning company in my city." And people genuinely want to support local. A focused name, a focused area, strong reviews. You get found faster than the others in your area who've been at this much longer than you have.

If you already have a name that isn't hyper-local, don't worry about it. The name is one piece. The strategy is what matters: pick a zone, own it, stop trying to be everywhere at once.

Three times, Jen and I tried to expand our geographic footprint. Three times, we pulled back and asked ourselves why we were working harder for worse results. I needed to feel busy, because busy felt like growth. It wasn't. It was just more work.

What snapped us out of it was a stat I'd heard a hundred times but never applied to our own backyard. Roughly 10% of households hire a cleaning company. In Oak Bay, that's 3,000 people. In Victoria, that's 40,000. We hadn't made a dent. We didn't need more locations. We needed to get better at serving the market we were already in.

So we stopped expanding. We had free time. Money coming in. Not enough problems to fill the day, which was the whole point when we started.

I filled that free time with this. Watching someone in Cincinnati or Montreal or London build something real turns out to be more meaningful than anything expanding Oak Bay Clean ever would have been. When I want to make a video, I make it. When someone books a Discovery Call, I show up. That's the job now.

Oak Bay Clean. 120 recurring clients. $760K a year. Gym in the middle of the day. No longer worried about the cost of groceries.

— Vic

P.S. Hit reply and tell me — what area are you planting your flag in?