Context
I opened MaidThis Phoenix in February 2024 as a franchise, funded with an SBA loan. We do residential, Airbnb, move-out and commercial cleaning. Our cleaning teams are independent contractors, paid weekly per job. I live in the Bay Area, so the business had to work without me there from the start.
Hiring
Hiring is the biggest part of this business. I’ve onboarded about 200 cleaning teams since opening, and most of them didn’t last. Our process is built to filter people out early: an application, an interview, paperwork, an onboarding call, a paid test clean, an audit of the first 10 cleans, and a ranking system that gives the best teams the most work.
Two changes made the biggest difference:
- Fixing a 40% drop-off. When I tracked every hiring stage, I found we were losing about 40% of applicants between Indeed and our applicant tracking system. Indeed had not turned on apply-by-link for our account. After a long back-and-forth with their support, they turned it on and the drop-off closed.
- Moving the test clean later. A test clean costs us about $100. Some teams cleaned well but couldn’t use our software, and others missed their onboarding call. I moved the test clean after the onboarding call, so we only pay to test teams who show up and can use our tools.
I later rebuilt the whole pipeline. That work is its own project: Rebuilding our cleaner hiring pipeline.
Sales hires
I hired five remote sales agents in one year. Two left and I let three go. I had been hiring on attitude and work ethic, which still works well for ops roles. My first ops hire started as a generalist and is now my business manager. For sales, attitude wasn’t enough. I now screen for real sales experience and have candidates walk me through it in detail.
Pricing and cash
I benchmarked a dozen local competitors, adjusted our rates and fixed how we estimate labor on deep cleans. Team pay went from 57% of revenue to 52%. I now keep team pay at or under 53% of the job price, and I accept a thinner margin on large jobs to stay competitive.
The hardest stretch came when a campaign worked better than planned and demand jumped. A commercial client paid on net-15 terms while I paid teams weekly. I brought on a cleaning team paid monthly to match that client’s terms until cash stabilized. I also built a 13-week cash flow forecast and cleaned some jobs myself while we hired.
Running it remotely
I fully implemented EOS at the end of 2024. That gave us a weekly scorecard, quarterly goals (EOS calls them Rocks, and they work like OKRs) and a weekly meeting where every issue gets an owner and a due date. I set this up before hiring more people so new hires would join an existing system. We also have SOPs for each area of the business, daily checklists for each role and an AI recruiting bot that handles applicant scheduling and paperwork.
Results
- Revenue up 164% from year one to year two
- About 100 recurring clients, with commercial work making up about 20% of revenue
- About 200 teams onboarded and about 15 active at a time
- Team pay down from 57% to 52% of revenue
- Moved ad spend from Google LSA (about $650 per recurring customer) to a recurring-only Thumbtack setup that costs about 60% less
- An Airbnb host campaign built from public permit records: about $250 in cost and about $85K in first-year revenue
- My time went from 40+ hours a week in year one to 5 to 7 hours now
What I’d do differently
- Screen sales hires for real experience from the start.
- Implement EOS fully in the first month instead of the first year.
- Build the cash flow forecast before signing the first commercial contract.
- Track the hiring funnel by stage from day one.